Richard Aldington

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Aldington, Richard (Edward Godfree) (1892–1962), married Hilda Doolittle ( H. D.) in 1913 and they both worked as editors on the Imagist periodical the Egoist. In 1915 Aldington's first volume of poetry, Images 1910–1915, was published by the Poetry Bookshop. (See Imagism.) Subsequent volumes include Images of War (1919) and A Fool i' the Forest (1925), which shows perhaps an excessive debt to The Waste Land. Aldington achieved popular success with his first novel, Death of a Hero (1929, abridged; Paris, 1930, unexpurgated), based on his own war experiences. It relates the life and death of George Winterbourne, killed in action in 1918; the first two parts dwell on his youth and ‘advanced’ marriage, satirizing the complacency and frivolity of pre-war middle-class and Bohemian England, and Part III is a horrifying description of life at the front in France. Of his later works the best known are his biographies, which include Portrait of a Genius, But…(1950), a controversial life of D. H. Lawrence, and his life of T. E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry (1955), which caused a furore by its attack on Lawrence as an ‘impudent mythomaniac’. He also published many translations, an autobiography (Life for Life's Sake, 1941), and critical essays.