David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English writer of the 20th century, whose prolific and diverse output included novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings, translations, literary criticism and personal letters. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanizing effects of modernity and industrialisation. In them, Lawrence confronts issues relating to emotional health and vitality, spontaneity, human sexuality and instinct.

Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage." At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." Later, the influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis championed both his artistic integrity and his moral seriousness, placing much of Lawrence's fiction within the canonical "great tradition" of the English novel. He is now generally valued as a visionary thinker and a significant representative of modernism in English literature, although some feminists object to the attitudes toward women and sexuality found in his works.

Originally published abroad in 1928, and unavailable in Britain until 1960 when it was the subject of an infamous obscenity trial, Lady Chatterley's Lover is now regarded as one of the pivotal novels of the 20th century. Lawrence's determination to explore every aspect—sexual, social, psychological—of Lady Chatterley's adulterous liaison with the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors makes for a profound meditation on the human condition, the forces of nature, and the social constraints that people struggle to overcome. Lawrence's final novel—here presented in the more explicit 1927 version which he described as "so improper that it'll never be printed"—confirms his standing as one of the most eminent fiction writers that England has produced.