T. E. Lawrence

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T. E. Lawrence : biography

16 August 1888 – 13 May 1935

After Lawrence’s death, A. W. Lawrence inherited Lawrence’s estate and his copyrights as the sole beneficiary. To pay the inheritance tax, he sold the U.S. copyright of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (subscribers’ text) outright to Doubleday Doran in 1935. Doubleday still controls publication rights of this version of the text of Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the USA. In 1936 Prof. Lawrence split the remaining assets of the estate, giving Clouds Hill and many copies of less substantial or historical letters to the nation via the National Trust, and then set up two trusts to control interests in T. E. Lawrence’s residual copyrights. To the original Seven Pillars Trust, Prof. Lawrence assigned the copyright in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, as a result of which it was given its first general publication. To the Letters and Symposium Trust, he assigned the copyright in The Mint and all Lawrence’s letters, which were subsequently edited and published in the book T. E. Lawrence by his Friends (edited by A. W. Lawrence, London, Jonathan Cape, 1937).

A substantial amount of income went directly to the RAF Benevolent Fund or for archaeological, environmental, or academic projects. The two trusts were amalgamated in 1986 and, on the death of Prof. A. W. Lawrence in 1991, the unified trust also acquired all the remaining rights to Lawrence’s works that it had not owned, plus rights to all of Prof. Lawrence’s works.

Bibliography

  • Seven Pillars of Wisdom, an account of Lawrence’s part in the Arab Revolt. (ISBN 0-8488-0562-3)
  • Revolt in the Desert, an abridged version of Seven Pillars of Wisdom. (ISBN 1-56619-275-7)
  • The Mint, an account of Lawrence’s service in the Royal Air Force. (ISBN 0-393-00196-2)
  • Crusader Castles, Lawrence’s Oxford thesis. London: Michael Haag 1986 (ISBN 0-902743-53-8). The first edition was published in London in 1936 by the Golden Cockerel Press, in 2 volumes, limited to 1000 editions.
  • The Odyssey of Homer, Lawrence’s translation from the Greek. (ISBN 0-19-506818-1)
  • The Forest Giant, by Adrien Le Corbeau, novel, Lawrence’s translation from the French, 1924.
  • The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, selected and edited by Malcolm Brown. London, J. M Dent. 1988 (ISBN 0-460-04733-7)
  • The Letters of T. E. Lawrence, edited by David Garnett. (ISBN 0-88355-856-4)
  • Jeremy Wilson, T. E. Lawrence. Letters. (See Prospectus )
  • Minorities: Good Poems by Small Poets and Small Poems by Good Poets, edited by Jeremy Wilson, 1971. Lawrence’s commonplace book includes an introduction by Jeremy Wilson that explains how the poems comprising the book reflected Lawrence’s life and thoughts.
  • Lawrence In Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East, by Scott Anderson. Doubleday, 2013.