D. H. Lawrence is recognized as one of the greatest novelists of this century. His work is taught in schools and universities all over the world. Yet, more than thirty years after the failure to ban Lady Chatterley's Lover in England fundamentally changed the moral climate of that country and of America, Lawrence remains a controversial figure. Regarded by many women during his lifetime as a sexual prophet, in recent years his supposed misogyny has drawn fierce condemnation from feminist critics. In this new biography of Lawrence, Elaine Feinstein explores his relationships with the women in his own life, many of whom have their counterparts in his novels. She traces the obsessive nature of his love for his mother, Lydia; his difficult relationship with his first sweetheart, Jessie Chambers; his pursuit of the bisexual Helen Corke; and the failure of his youthful engagement to Louisa Burrows. She gives a fascinating account of his long, battling marriage to Frieda von Richthofen; his friendships with women writers like Katherine Mansfield and Catherine Carswell; and the attachment to Lawrence of patronesses such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, Lady Cynthia Asquith and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Lawrence and the Women investigates the paradoxes of Lawrence's personality. He was considered to have a rare understanding of women's sexuality, yet his own sexual relationships were unusually difficult. He put all his faith in the energies of the body, yet his own was frail and sickly. He argued that women needed to submit to men, but he never succeeded in dominating his own wife, Frieda. With a novelist's eye for detail and uncanny intuition about character, Elaine Feinstein probes the sources of Lawrence's attitudes toward women with candor and compassion. Always responsive to the poetry and power of his writing, she offers a fresh and surprising portrait of one of the most misunderstood literary figures of our time.

The basement: two men, (Tim) Law and (Charles) Stott, compete for possession of and dominance over a "basement flat" and their at-times mutual girlfriend, Jane. During the course of the play, they reverse roles with relation to each other, to the ownership or possession of the flat, and to their relationship with or possession of Jane. The changing furnishings of the room reflect their changing roles and who is in power over whom at various points in time. At first Jane appears to be submissive in relation to the men; but as the action develops, at times she appears to dominate each man and both of them. The character relationships between Stott and Law and the basic plot resemble Pinter's prose fiction works "Kullus" and "The Examination".

William Carlos Williams was born on September 17, 1883 in Rutherford, New Jersey. As well as being a poet he painted and maintained a lifelong interest in it. Williams was also a physician in both paediatrics and general medicine. He served at the Passaic General Hospital in Passaic, New Jersey as chief of paediatrics from 1924 until his death. Williams is most well-known for his poems that are closely associated with the Modernism and Imagism movements. In addition to poetry he occasionally wrote short stories, plays, novels, essays, and worked on translations. He practiced medicine by day and wrote at night. Early in his career, he briefly became involved in the Imagist movement via friendships with Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.). Soon his opinions moved away from theirs and his style began to confirm his alignment to a modernist expression of his surrounding environment. From the late 40's health became a major issue in his life but with himself as the patient. He suffered a heart attack in 1948 and, after 1949, a series of strokes. One such stoke in 1953 left him in hospital for four months and brought about severe depression. In these later years, Williams mentored and influenced many younger poets especially the American literary movements of the 1950s; the Beat movement, the San Francisco Renaissance, the Black Mountain school, and the New York School. One of Williams's most productive relationships was with fellow New Jersey poet Allen Ginsberg. Williams included several of Ginsberg's letters in Paterson, stating that one of them helped inspire the fifth volume of that work. Williams also wrote the introduction to Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956. William Carlos Williams died on March 4th, 1963, at the age of 79 at his home in Rutherford. He was buried in Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey.

Wolfgang Paalen was a central figure in internationalist surrealist circles in the late 1930s. Artist and intellectual, he was a European whose fascination with archaic cultures led him finally to Mexico, where he founded the influential magazine DYN in 1941. In the bold texts from DYN that make up Form and Sense, we encounter a unique artistic mind and an oracular voice. Paalen’s book is an intellectual delight with essays on cubism, surrealism, the universality of forms in architecture, and the relationships that exist between art and science. He weaves together the new ideas and archaic inspirations in twentieth-century painting and sculpture. His nuanced and original considerations of some key figures—Mondrian, Kandinsky, Picasso—marked Paalen in turn as a significant thinker in the world of modern art. This painter’s book, illustrated with carefully chosen examples of the art he examines, makes us not only understand but also experience the rich interplay between idea and image that informs the art of our own time. A new introduction by the scholar Martica Sawin examines Paalen’s career, particularly his influential writing on surrealism and abstraction.