What Would You Pay For A Publishing House? Digital publishers like Clocktower Books (founded 1996, world's sixth digital publisher) have changed the rules by which the game is played—or, better yet, by which the business is worked. It is a business, and today we learn the core secret of the publishing industry: how accountants and auditors value a publishing house… (John T. Cullen, Special to Publishing Industry News, 08 May 2011. Copyright • 2011. All Rights Reserved.)

D. H. Lawrence, Author & Self-Publisher. This is a picture of D. H. Lawrence before 1925, when he was still in reasonably good health. Most photographs of D. H. Lawrence show him late in his brief life, suffering from various ailments, including the tuberculosis that killed him at Vence, near Nice and the French Riviera, at age 44. (Among the many famous artists who died near Vence's healing water springs were French painter Raoul Dufy in 1953, French painter Henri Matisse in 1954, French-Belarus painter Marc Chagall in 1985, and U.S. author James Baldwin in 1987.) Vence was, therefore, a healing spring and a place to die. During his lifetime, the already frail Lawrence complained to his friends that the 'hatred' he experienced from publishers, critics, and civil authorities was physically killing him. His novels, tame by modern standards, and some self-published, were banned in English-speaking countries. According to ABE Books, D.H. Lawrence self-published his novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in Florence, Italy in 1928. It was banned in the English-speaking world, with Draconian penalties for its import, transport, and sale in the U.K. and the U.S. The first complete and unexpurgated edition was not released until 1960 through Penguin in the U.K. At that time, the publisher, Penguin (thus also, implicitly and posthumously, the author) were put on trial in the U.K. under a 1959 Obscene Publications Act. After expert testimony from leading literary figures, the defendant (Penguin) was able to prove the book had 'literary merit,' and the result was a 'not guilty' verdict. As a comedic side act, Chief Prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-Jones protested publicly by asking if this were the kind of book "you would wish your wife or servants to read." His innocently classist and petulantly absurd colic exposed the necrotic souls, the petty and monstrous cruelty, and the moral stench, of Lawrence's authoritarian and oppressive tormentors. And of course Lawrence was in the good company of James Joyce and many other persecuted geniuses—dead at 44, having penned some of the world's great literature, having endured the spittle and wrath of his Inquisitioners, and having published some of the English language's best novels.

Frieda Lawrence, Baroness von Richthofen. Normally, I do not devote space to the spouse(s) of famous authors, but this story is too interesting to ignore, and it is after all a vital part of D. H. Lawrence's life. We must remember: History is Context. Frieda Lawrence will be a fun exception. She is alternately castigated as Lawrence's dull, witless tormentor and praised as his loyal muse and inspiration. In her youth, she was something of a minor beauty. She was ever full of character and intelligence. Not only that, but she was a distant cousin of Baron von Richthofen, Germany's leading air ace in World War I. And her story with Lawrence has some hilarious moments. She stuck with him to the bitter end (and beyond, bringing his ashes to their final resting place in New Mexico). Some critics have suggested that the young, lovely noblewoman Frieda was a prime model (though not the only one) for the aristocratic woman in Lady Chatterley's Lover, who has an affair with a working class man (Lawrence himself).

Backdrop for Frieda and Herbert. Before the war, relations between Germany and England were in certain ways very close, which indirectly casts the story of Frieda and David Herbert Richards Lawrence in an intersting light. The British royal house, who changed their name to Windsor from Saxe-Coburg und Gotha in 1917, during the Great War, were of German descent. Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was an English princess of German descent via her grandfather, King George III who was at once King of England and King of Hanover, Germany. (Britain and Hanover had had a joint monarch since 1714.) Though George III never visited Hanover, his Continental holding was part of the complex network of feudal loyalties dating to European Medieval times. Ironically, as King of England, George was head of the Church of England (Anglican; Protestant), yet he was a monarch in the Holy Roman Empire (predominantly Roman Catholic; eventually Habsburg, Austro-Hungarian) as well. George's fourth son, Prince Edward (after whom the eastern Canadian province of Prince Edward Island is named), was Queen Victoria's father. Victoria's mother was George III's German wife, Queen Charlotte of Great Britain (for short), born Duchess Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Victoria, who became queen in 1837, married her cousin Albert of Saxe-Coburg und Gotha in 1840 (he died in 1861, and she plunged the world into mourning for the next forty years). The couple had nine children, who in turn delivered 42 grandchildren. Their children and grandchildren intermarried with royalty throughout Europe, making Victoria the 'grandmother of Europe.' At her funeral in 1901, her close relatives included at least 25 monarchs, arch dukes, grand dukes, dukes, crown princes, and several emperors. Victoria's third son, Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn (Ireland, now defunct), is listed by London's Sunday Times as accompanying the Kaiser (Emperor) of Germany (who was also King of Prussia) on a special imperial train from Potsdam near Berlin to the Channel coast, and thence by ship and train to London: "His Majesty (i.e., the Kaiser, Wilhelm II von Hohenzollern) wore the uniform of the 1st Dragoon Guards, the Queen of England's Prussian Regiment, and the Duke of Connaught (i.e., Arthur) was in his Prussian uniform of the Ziethen Hussars." There were many signs of the close relationship between the Germans and the British. Of all strokes of historic irony, the following is probably tops. As Queen Victoria lay dying in 1901, two men were at her bedside, holding her as she gasped her last breaths. One was her son Edward (1841-1910), the soon to be King Edward VII of England. The other was her first and favorite grandson, William, who was then already Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Edward held her in his arms as she died. Wilhelm held his beloved grandmother's hand and wept. In no more than 13 years, their two nations would be principals in a vast horror that would bleed the flower of European manhood dry, to the tune of more than 20,000,000 deaths between 1914 and 1918.

The Red Baron, His Family, and various U.S. Connections. During the Great War, Manfred, Baron von Richthofen (1892-1918) became the most famous fighter ace of all time. Flying a red, triple-winged Fokker Dreidecker Mark I canvas and wood aircraft, von Richthofen scored 80 kills and became famous, before being fatally shot down over Amiens on the Western Front in 1918. Manfred's brother Lothar was also an air ace, with 40 kills, before dying in a plane crash after the war in 1922. Baron Walter von Richthofen, an uncle of Manfred, immigrated the United States in 1877, and settled in Denver, founding the Denver Chamber of Commerce. Frieda von Richthofen (1879–1956) was a fifth cousin once removed. Frieda's sister Else von Richthofen (1874-1973) was a famous German social scientist. Like Frieda, Else (Ph.D. in Economics, Heidelberg, 1901; feminist) had a charming and varied marital and extra-marital life, her paramours including the sociologist Max Weber. The broader von Richthofen family has included many men and women who distinguished themselves in war, the arts, and the sciences.

Frieda and Herbert. Frieda (1879-1956) was born in Metz, France, an ancient Celtic (Gaulish) and Roman city with a long, rich history extending back at least 3,000 years. Metz lies in the pale between the modern French and German nations, and was contested territory in several wars. Metz today is the capital of the Lorraine region, and prefecture of the Moselle department, of France. Metz was the scene of Napoleon III's catastrophic defeat in 1871, in the Franco-Prussian War, at which time it became a German garrison city. Frieda's father was a baron and an engineer in the German army. In 1899, Frieda married Ernest Weekley, a British linguists professor, with whom she moved to Nottingham, U.K. and had three children. She met D. H. Lawrence, a student of her husband, in 1912. She fell in love with Lawrence and eloped with him from U.K. to Metz, then still in Germany, leaving her husband and children behind. She and Weekley were divorced in 1914, upon which she promptly married Lawrence. Soon after, during the war, German authorities arrested Lawrence on suspicion of being a German spy. Lawrence was freed after vigorous invention by her father, the German baron and army engineer. The couple undertook a brisk walking tour south into France and Italy. Lawrence's health, while never strong, had not yet broken. During the war, they settled in a coastal village in distant Cornwall, not far from the fabled Penzance of pirate fame. Just as they had been harrassed in Germany, now they were subjected to hostility from their neighbors and from British authorities. Frieda was suspected of signaling to German submarines by the manner in which she hung out her wash on a clothesline visible from the English Channel below. The two traveled extensively around the world, especially in New Mexico (Taos), France, and Italy. In 1925, Lawrence contracted malaria and tuberculosis in Mexico. Both diseases stay in the system for potentially decades, and tuberculosis at that time was frequently fatal. Lawrence died at Vence in 1930. Frieda soon remarried, but brought Lawrence's ashes with her to New Mexico, where they are enshrined near Taos. Frieda died in 1977 at the ranch near Taos, which she had shared with her third husband, Angelo Ravagli; the D. H. Lawrence ranch is now owned by the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque. During her later years, Frieda was part of a broad movement of artists and intellectuals centering on the region and the ranch, whose visitors included the artist Georgia O'Keeffe and her husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

Selected Major Works of D. H. Lawrence: The Peacock (1911). Lawrence wrote The White Peacock starting 1906, and published its ultimate rewrite in 1911 when he was 21 years old. By then (1908) Lawrence had left the coal mining country for London and its vibrant literary and artistic environment. Like some of his more powerful later works, the novel reflects typical themes of his home life in the coal towns of Nottingham. It portrays the struggles of failing marriages, and the desire of a character to find spiritual and romantic equilibrium. It is fairly certain that Lawrence was bisexual, and that he had already by then (at age 16) had one of the most profound love affairs of his life with a young coal mining man near home. Like George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and H. G. Wells, he wrote as well of social inequities and the plight of working people in an industrialized society.

The Trespasser (1912). Biographical fiction depicting the true story of a friend, Helen Corke, who had an adulterous relationship with a married man, which ended with his suicide.

Sons and Lovers (1913). Autobiographical fiction reflecting what Lawrence saw as the unhappy marriage of his mother, an expressive woman, with his father, whom he saw as dour. The novel, which represents the start of Lawrence's controversies, projects powerful Oedipal themes and tragedies. Each of his fictional heroine's three sons is so affected by an underlying, Platonic love with the mother, that each son becomes impotent toward women in adult life. Telegraphed in all of this must be Lawrence's personal struggle with his own conflicted and forbidden sexualities. This novel, which he took to Germany with him shortly before meeting Frieda there, was resoundingly condemned as 'unthinkable' by the famous publisher Wilhelm Heinemann himself. The book served to get Lawrence noticed by the London literary establishment and gained him the support and friendship of well-known authors including Ford Maddox Ford and many others.

The Rainbow (1915). Prosecuted in an obscenity trial, the novel frankly speaks of sexual desire and intimate relationships involving three generations of the Brangwen family. All copies were seized and burned. The stage was now set for Lawrence's unflinching themes and his conflicts with hyper-Victorian moral enforcers. The book's 1920 sequel would be Women in Love.

Women in Love (1920). Sequel to The Rainbow (1915). Follows the love lives of two sisters, Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, in pre-war British society. Over sefenty years after its publication proclaimed one of the top 100 books in English literature, the book was widely condemned as putrid trash and other violent condemnations that began undermining Lawrence's health. Banned in U.K. after another obscenity trial.

The Lost Girl (1920). Depicts the sexual awakening of a young Midlands working girl, Alvina, daughter of a widowed draper. Her father buys a circus to regain his financial stability, but Alvina falls in love with the sensuous Italian Ciccio and flees with him to Naples, where she experiences a brief fling with sexuality and freedom. Won the most prestigious British literary award, a James Tait Black Memorial Prize (established 1919).

Aaron's Rod (1922). A coal mines union official, trapped in a stale marriage, abandons his wife and children and runs off to Italy. Italy, in Victorian and Edwardian British literature, as in E. M. Forester (Room With A View et al, represents the mysterious, forbidding, hot-blooded southern race of Roman Catholics who allegedly have lower standing in morals, intelligence, and most other qualities. No doubt a further projection of the virulent bigotry showered upon Britain's Irish subjects, and by WASPish imitation on Irish-Americans in the United States, this spirit is also reflected in slavish U.S. Anglophilian adulations like Henry James' Daisy Miller. The key is the Grand Tour, in which upstanding, white, upper crust Protestant northerners take a necessary but morally frightening journey through the riches of ancient Europe, which lie buried in purulent, Popish swamps infested by browner-skinned people who sleep all day and prey upon innocent young northern girls by night. There may well even be a pathological ingrowth of this in the inexplicable craze for vampire stories whose modern form originated with British sources (Lord Byron and the Italian-British John Polidori, 1816; Irish-British Bram Stoker. Be that all as it may, 1922 was also the year in which James Joyce published the controversial Ulysses, a novel soon banned and subject to obscenity trials in the U.K. and the U.S.—focusing, of all things, of an Irish Jew having an extra-marital affair—a trifecta of horror, loathing, and immorality in the day.

More… Lawrence continued in this general vein, increasingly raising a drumbeat of alarm that would be viscerally captured in his description of Nazi-era Germans visiting Italy, in his posthumously published (1932) collection of essays, Etruscan Places. In 1923, Kangaroo warned of growing fascism in Australia. One wonders if he detected any in the United States, and perhaps was too frightened to mention the corporate domination of his own final resting place. In 1924, he published The Boy in the Bush, also set in Western Australia. In a sense, Lawrence is a Philip K. Dick-like author, in that Lawrence was officially reviled during his life, as PKD was abused and ignored. The two authors share in common that they have a large number of posthumous, widely acclaimed movies made, earning generally huge box office takes for their estates, while they had lived for the most part in poverty. The Boy in the Bush, like many of D. H. Lawrence's novels, became a TV miniseries in 1984, starring Kenneth Branagh.

The Plumed Serpent (1926) Written near Taos, NM, a novel about the Mexican revolution of 1910, led by Porfirio Diaz and Francisco Madero, which started as a war of progressive causes and degenerated into a many-sided civil war. It led to the Mexican Constitution of 1917, but peace came slowly, with violent outbreaks at least as late as 1926. Lawrence portrays political and spiritual themes. About this time, he contracted the third and final bout of tuberculosis, which would kill him by 1930.

Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) Probably the novel he is best known for. First published in Florence in 1928, it could not be published in England until 1960. It was banned and panned in the U.S. until a famous Supreme Court case of 1959 caused the ideal of the First Amendment of the Constitution to be connected with reality, so that witch hunts against great artist became a thing of the past (at least, as long as pitchfork-holding hymn yodelers from biblical backwaters do not prevail politically, as is currently a greater fear in the U.S. than the late Osama bin Laden's only slightly less violently insane followers). Even then, in 1960, Penguin was hauled into court on obscenity charges, which were only dropped after a lengthy trial involving some of the nation's leading intellectual authorities. The chief prosecutor's lame and exceedingly dense protest was already mentioned above. Contains classical D. H. Lawrence themes in which he returns to the Cornish mining country of his youth (and his mother) to explore a sexual liaison with a young woman and her wealthy, impotent husband's groundskeeper. May be modeled on Lawrence's own homosexual affair with a young Cornish coal miner at age 16. In the background play themes of social disparity and the British class system. The groundskeeper in Lady Chatterley's Lover is Mellors, while the misanthropic gamekeeper in The Peacock is similar, and the tragic mother figure in Sons and Lovers is named Mrs. Morel. Of course, Lawrence was no doubt influenced by the notorious and beautiful Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), who moved in aristocratic, literary, and artistic circles (friends with Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, T. S. Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence, and many artists). She was a literary inspiration for several famous authors, and is thought to be the seminal persona for Hermione Roddice in D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love.

Last Writes In 1929, Lawrence published The Escaped Cock, a reflection on Christianity, spirituality, the meaning of life, and death. The book was posthumously re-released as The Man Who Died. Lawrence's final novel, released 1930, was The Virgin and the Gypsy. A 1970 movie, based on the latter novel, starred Honor Blackman. The latter novel explores classic Lawrence themes of moral oppression, unhappiness, family scandal, and sexual exploration in forbidden areas in search of escape, sensual release, and freedom. Here, the forbidden exploration is, as frequently was the case in British literature, toward a Gypsy and his family.

Conclusion I have presented, rather informally, a brief and sketchy biography of D. H. Lawrence, given sort of a blur of a rich but tragic life lived with intellectual and artistic conviction in the face of all the mean-spiritedness, mediocrity, and repression that the world is very capable of. The story shines forth autobiographically between the lines of many of his books. He also wrote a rich legacy of essays, poetry, short stories, and plays during his short (44 year) life. He was an author who self-published because he had no other options.