Lawrence's growth to maturity was a painful and traumatic business, the impulses of the young lover constantly thwarted by the self-doubt of the mother's son. Philip Callow captures the extraordinary drama of Lawrence's life from 1885, the year of his birth, to 1919 when he quit England. In rich and intimate detail, Mr. Callow recreates the half-rural, half-industrial world of the English Midlands where Lawrence grew up and which haunted his imagination all his life; he traces Lawrence's relationships with women, particularly his dominating mother, his first love Jessie Chambers, and earthy...

Published on the hundredth anniversary of Van Gogh s death, this is the first full-length biography of this undying man in twenty years and surely the most comprehensive account to date. Mr. Callow treats more searchingly than any previous work the development of Van Gogh s genius and his emergence as an artist after early struggles to find a vocation, first in the world of art dealing and later as an evangelical missionary among Belgian miners. Using the skills and psychological insights of an accomplished novelist, and drawing upon new Van Gogh materials which have surfaced in the last two...

Philip Callow s new biography of Russia s greatest dramatist and storyteller is a major achievement. By examining Chekhov s life within the context of the evolution of his art, Mr. Callow makes the reader acutely aware of the hidden ground from which Chekhov s work sprang and on which his divided life stood. Arthur Miller calls Chekhov in nearly every way our contemporary. His irony is as modern as Beckett s; as a letter writer he is as natural and irresistible as D. H. Lawrence. In his personal life he is as understated as in his work. But the love theme that is central to his biography and...