D. H. Lawrence — 1964 ·

An Unprofessional Study

By Anaïs Nin

In 1932, two years after D. H. Lawrence's death, a young woman wrote a book about him and presented it to a Paris publisher. She recorded the event in her diary: "It will not be published and out by tomorrow, which is what a writer would like when the book is hot out of the oven, when it is alive within oneself. He gave it to his assistant to revise." The woman was Anaïs Nin.

Nin examined Lawrence's poetry, novels, essays, and travel writing. She analyzed and explained the more important philosophical concepts contained in his writings, particularly the themes of love, death, and religion, as well as his attention to primitivism and to women. But what Anaïs Nin brought to the explication of Lawrence's writing was an understanding of the fusion of imaginative, intuitive, and intellectual elements from which he drew his characters, themes, imagery and symbolism.

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Anaïs Nin is one of the most unique literary figures of this century. As a novelist she has been distinctly catalytic, and her life-long diary resembles no other in the history of letters. From a small circle of admirers her audience has been transformed in recent years to a large following of international proportions. Her books have been published in a dozen languages, and she is in constant demand as a lecturer. In 1973 Anaïs Nin received the honorary degree of Doctor of Fine Arts from the Philadelphia College of Art, and in 1974 she was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters.