d.h. lawrence and the bad side of books

My debut book review in the Washington Examiner Magazine. Excited to be a regular contributor moving forward!:

During his life, D.H. Lawrence was thought of as a pornographer posing as an artist. The novelist, poet, essayist, and playwright was, for a time, synonymous with purple prose and licentiousness. His novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover was put on trial for obscenity. James Joyce found Lawrence’s writing filthy, and Virginia Woolf held him in the lowest esteem. Rebecca West, in an elegy published after Lawrence’s untimely death from tuberculosis in 1930, wrote of her discovery that what she’d always “put down to Lawrence’s persecution mania had a solid basis” in the numerous obituaries that denied him not only the homage due a deceased genius but also the “courtesy paid to any corpse.”
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Nearly 90 years after his death, that unfair reputation remains tragically intact. So why has the New York Review Books Classics imprint brought out a new edition of his selected essays? Because there’s much more to Lawrence’s work than his detractors care to admit. There is his complex and vivid philosophy, based on following one’s primal drives into a more sensual engagement with life and a more honest sense of self. And there is, above all, the lush beauty of his language, prose that has a pulse and gives off heat.

Here.