Jack Grant arrives in Western Australia in 1882, having been expelled from his public school and then sent down from an agricultural college. He experiences hunting, farming, gold mining, fights and his first love of women. His character is forged by the Australian landscape and its hard, no-nonsense people. From the young boy emerges a tough Lawrentian hero. Lawrence and his wife Frieda, arrived in Australia in 1922 where they met the Quaker nurse Mollie Skinner. Skinner showed Lawrence her novel, "Black Swans". Lawrence advised her to drop this book and write about the first settlers in Australia. In 1923 Skinner sent Lawrence her novel, "The House of Ellis" which Lawrence completely rewrote and published as "The Boy in the Bush". Skinner gave her permission for the redrafting but is said to have wept at the new ending. "The Boy in the Bush" ‘perhaps gives us Lawrence’s response to Australia more purely than his own Australian novel Kangaroo.’
Author
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. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.H.\_Law...
