T. E. Lawrence — Seven Pillars of Wisdom
The Making of a Book…
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silence of stars. We were a self-centred army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man’s creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strengths, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare…T.E. Lawrence — Seven Pillars of Wisdom
With Lawrence’s death in May 1935 the interest in the man by the reading public became quite phenomenal, with the commercial edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, published by Jonathan Cape on the 29th of July 1935, an instant best seller with over 100,000 copies sold in England alone by Christmas of that year. The book has remained, in many editions, a best-seller ever since.
Lawrence had completed a book called ‘Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ in 1913, based upon his Crusader Castles Oxford thesis of 1908, subtitled ‘a moral symphony’, which he later became dissatisfied with and burned. But during the First World War he was again fired by the idea of writing a book and began ‘scribbling’ descriptive passages on…
