Mornings In Mexico

Description:
Much of D.H. Lawrence's life was defined by his passion for travel and it was those peripatetic wanderings that gave life to some of his greatest novels. In the 1920s, Lawrence travelled several times to Mexico, where he was fascinated by the clash of beauty and brutality, purity and darkness that he observed there. The diverse and evocative essays that make up 'Mornings in Mexico' - 'Market Day', 'Dance of the Sprouting Corn', 'The Hopi Snake Dance' - bring to life the elemental simplicity of the Zapotec Indians in Mexico, the intense, dark rhythms of the Indians in the American South West and are brightly adorned with simple and evocative details sharply observed: piles of fruit in a village market, strolls in a courtyard filled with hibiscus and roses, the play of light on an adobe wall. It was during his time in Mexico that Lawrence re-wrote 'The Plumed Serpent', which is infused with his own experiences there. The spirited eloquence and beauty of the essays in 'Mornings in Mexico' thus illuminate the inspiration behind of one of Lawrence's most loved works and immerse the reader in a portrait of the country like no other.

Review:
''If you read only one book of travellers' tales on Mexico, it must be this one. A magnificent blood-and-ganglion pagan response to the primeval savagery south of the Rio Grande.' - Frank McLynn, Top Ten Books, The Guardian 'He wrote something like three dozen books, of which even the worst page dances with life that could be mistaken for no other man's, while the best are admitted, even by those who hate him, to be unsurpassed.' - Catherine Carswell, Time and Tide 'He is an extraordinarily acute noticer of the world, human and natural. And it is not just the natural world that beckons Lawrence to flood it with beautiful language.. he can be as precise and compact an observer of human interaction as Flaubert or Forster.' - James Wood, The Guardian'

Author Biography:
D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), novelist, poet, playwright, painter, critic, is an icon of 20th century literature. He began writing at an early age, publishing his first novel, The White Peacock, when he was twenty-five, Sons and Lovers three years later and The Rainbow and Women in Love in his thirties. His hatred of militarism, openly expressed during the First World War, sparked a wave of vilification that forced him to leave England and embark on what he called his 'Savage Pilgrimage'. He spent the remainder of his life travelling - to America, Italy, Austria, Mexico, the South of France and Sri Lanka - and it was during this time that he wrote such classics as Sea and Sardinia, The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley's Lover. With the exception of E.M. Forster, who called him 'the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation' and friends such as Aldous Huxley, Lawrence's obituarists were dismissive and hostile. It was not until The Lady Chatterley Trial thirty years after his death and the subsequent publication of the book that Lawrence was finally recognised as one of the great writers and thinkers of his age.