A short life of the author
Thomas Edward Lawrence (16 August 1888 – 19 May 1935), known worldwide as Lawrence of Arabia, was a British soldier, intelligence officer, archaeologist, diplomat, and writer whose personal legend — the slight, blue-eyed Oxford scholar who became a guerrilla leader in the Arabian desert, directed the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, and then retreated from fame into anonymous service in the ranks of the RAF — is one of the most extraordinary stories of the twentieth century. His account of the Arab campaign, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), is simultaneously a military memoir, a work of literature, a psychological confession, and a meditation on the relationship between action, identity, and guilt. It is one of the great books in the English language.
Life
Lawrence was born out of wedlock in Tremadog, North Wales. His father, Sir Thomas Chapman, was an Anglo-Irish baronet who had left his wife and taken the surname Lawrence to live with the family governess, Sarah Junner. The illegitimacy was a lifelong source of shame and psychological complexity for Lawrence. He was educated at Oxford High School and Jesus College, Oxford, where he studied medieval military architecture and conducted an archaeological walking tour of Crusader castles in Syria and Palestine.
Before the war, Lawrence worked on the archaeological excavation at Carchemish (in present-day Turkey) under D.G. Hogarth and Leonard Woolley. He learned Arabic, came to love Arab culture, and developed the regional knowledge that would make him invaluable to British military intelligence.
The Arab Revolt (1916–1918)
When the war began, Lawrence was assigned to the Arab Bureau in Cairo. In October 1916, he was sent to the Hejaz to assess the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, led by Sharif Hussein of Mecca and his sons, particularly Faisal (later King Faisal I of Iraq). Lawrence quickly became Faisal’s principal military advisor and the liaison between the Arab forces and the British command under General Allenby.
Lawrence helped devise and execute a guerrilla strategy — attacking the Hejaz Railway, avoiding pitched battles, exploiting the mobility of Bedouin forces — that tied down Turkish troops and protected the flank of Allenby’s advance through Palestine. His personal role was larger than a staff officer’s: he led raids, blew up trains, and endured extraordinary physical hardship. The capture of Aqaba in July 1917 — a surprise attack from the landward side across the Nefud desert — was the campaign’s most dramatic achievement.
The campaign culminated in the entry into Damascus in October 1918. But Lawrence’s experience was shadowed by a terrible event at Deraa in November 1917, where he was (by his own account) captured by Turkish soldiers, beaten, and sexually assaulted — an episode that haunted him for the rest of his life and that has been the subject of much historical debate.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)
Lawrence wrote and rewrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom obsessively during the early 1920s. He lost the first draft (over 250,000 words) at Reading railway station. He rewrote it from memory. He published a private subscribers’ edition (1926, limited to approximately 200 copies) lavishly illustrated with portraits by Augustus John, Eric Kennington, and others. This edition, which cost Lawrence a fortune and nearly bankrupted him, is one of the great book-objects of the twentieth century.
Revolt in the Desert (1927), an abridged popular version, was a bestseller. The full trade edition of Seven Pillars was published posthumously in 1935.
The book is a work of extraordinary literary ambition. Lawrence’s prose — influenced by Doughty’s Arabia Deserta, the King James Bible, and the Elizabethans — is dense, allusive, and capable of passages of great power: the descriptions of desert landscape, the night march to Aqaba, the massacre at Tafas. But the book is also a confession of failure and self-disgust: Lawrence believed he had deceived the Arabs by encouraging a revolt whose political fruits — Arab independence — Britain and France had already secretly agreed to deny them (the Sykes-Picot Agreement).
After the War
Lawrence became a global celebrity — partly through the work of the American journalist Lowell Thomas, whose illustrated lectures made “Lawrence of Arabia” famous worldwide. But Lawrence was horrified by his own legend. In 1922, he enlisted in the RAF as an aircraftman under the name John Hume Ross; when discovered, he transferred to the Royal Tank Corps as T.E. Shaw. He eventually returned to the RAF and served until his discharge in 1935. He was killed in a motorcycle accident in Dorset, aged forty-six.
The Mint (1955, published posthumously) is his account of RAF recruit training — brutally honest, beautifully observed.
Collecting Lawrence
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926, subscribers’ edition) is one of the most sought-after books of the twentieth century, bringing $30,000–$150,000 depending on condition and binding. The trade edition (1935, Jonathan Cape) brings $100–$500. Revolt in the Desert (1927) brings $50–$200. The Mint (1955) brings $30–$100. Lawrence’s letters — he was a prolific and brilliant correspondent — are collected and highly valued.