Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, Thomas Edward (T. E. Lawrence) (T. E. Shaw) (Lawrence of Arabia) (born August 15, 1888, Tremadoc, Caernarvonshire, Wales—died May 19, 1935, Clouds Hill, Dorset, England). British intelligence officer who helped inspire the Arab Revolt. T. E. Lawrence was a gifted writer and an advocate of Arab nationalism.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was known as the legendary “Lawrence of Arabia”. He earned this title from his exploits during World War I which led helped drive the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant.
T. E. Lawrence, byname Lawrence Of Arabia, was British archaeological scholar, military strategist, and author best known for his legendary war activities in the Middle East during World War I and for his account of those activities in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).
Lawrence was the son of Sir Thomas Chapman and Sara Maden, the governess of Sir Thomas’ daughters at Westmeath, with whom he had escaped from both marriage and Ireland. As “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence,” the couple had five sons (Thomas Edward was the second) during what was outwardly a marriage with all the benefits of clergy. In 1896, the family settled in Oxford, where T.E. (he preferred the initials to the names) attended the High School and Jesus College. Medieval military architecture was his first interest, and he pursued it in its historical settings, studying crusader castles in France and (in 1909) in Syria and Palestine and submitting a thesis on the subject that won him first-class honors in history in 1910. (It was posthumously published, as Crusader Castles, in 1936.) As a protégé of the Oxford archaeologist D.G. Hogarth, he acquired a demyship (travelling fellowship) from Magdalen College and joined an expedition excavating the Hittite settlement of Carchemish on the Euphrates, working there from 1911 to 1914, first under Hogarth and then under Sir Leonard Woolley, and using his free time to travel on his own and get to know the language and the people. Early in 1914 he and Woolley, and Captain S.F. Newcombe, explored northern Sinai, on the Turkish frontier east of Suez. Supposedly a scientific expedition, and in fact sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund, it was more a map-making reconnaissance from Gaza to Aqaba, destined to be of almost immediate strategic value. The cover study was nevertheless of authentic scholarly significance; written by Lawrence and Woolley together, it was published as The Wilderness of Zin in 1915.
The month the war began, Lawrence became a civilian employee of the Map Department of the War Office in London, charged with preparing a militarily useful map of Sinai. By December 1914 he was a lieutenant in Cairo. Experts on Arab affairs—especially those who had travelled in the Turkish-held Arab lands—were rare, and he was assigned to intelligence, where he spent more than a year, mostly interviewing prisoners, drawing maps, receiving and processing data from agents behind enemy lines, and producing a handbook on the Turkish Army. When, in mid-1915, his brothers Will and Frank were killed in action in France, T.E. was reminded cruelly of the more active front in the West. Egypt at the time was the staging area for Middle Eastern military operations of prodigious inefficiency; a trip to Arabia convinced Lawrence of an alternative method of undermining Germany’s Turkish ally. In October 1916 he had accompanied the diplomat Ronald Storrs on a mission to Arabia, where Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, amīr of Mecca, had the previous June proclaimed a revolt against the Turks. Storrs and Lawrence consulted with Ḥusayn’s son Abdullah, and Lawrence received permission to go on to consult further with another son, Fayṣal, then commanding an Arab force southwest of Medina. Back in Cairo in November, Lawrence urged his superiors to abet the efforts at rebellion with arms and gold and to make use of the dissident shaykhs by meshing their aspirations for independence with general military strategy. He rejoined Fayṣal’s army as political and liaison officer.
Lawrence was not the only officer to become involved in the incipient Arab rising, but from his own small corner of the Arabian Peninsula he quickly became—especially from his own accounts—its brains, its organizing force, its liaison with Cairo, and its military technician. His small but irritating second front behind the Turkish lines was a hit-and-run guerrilla operation, focusing upon the mining of bridges and supply trains and the appearance of Arab units first in one place and then another, tying down enemy forces that otherwise would have been deployed elsewhere, and keeping the Damascus-to-Medina railway largely inoperable, with potential Turkish reinforcements thus helpless to crush the uprising. In such fashion Lawrence—“Amīr Dynamite” to the admiring Bedouins—committed the cynical, self-serving shaykhs for the moment to his king-maker’s vision of an Arab nation, goaded them with examples of his own self-punishing personal valor when their spirits flagged, bribed them with promises of enemy booty and English gold sovereigns.
Aqaba—at the northernmost tip of the Red Sea—was the first major victory for the Arab guerrilla forces. They seized it after a two-month march on July 6, 1917. Thenceforth, Lawrence attempted to coordinate Arab movements with the campaign of General Sir Edmund Allenby, who was advancing toward Jerusalem, a tactic only partly successful. In November, Lawrence was captured at Darʿā by the Turks while reconnoitering the area in Arab dress and was apparently recognized and homosexually brutalized before he was able to escape. The experience, variously reported or disguised by him afterward, left real scars as well as wounds upon his psyche from which he never recovered. The next month, nevertheless, he took part in the victory parade in Jerusalem and then returned to increasingly successful actions in which Fayṣal’s forces nibbled their way north, and Lawrence rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).
By the time the motley Arab army reached Damascus in October 1918, Lawrence was physically and emotionally exhausted, having forced body and spirit to the breaking point too often. He had been wounded numerous times, captured, and tortured; had endured extremities of hunger, weather, and disease; had been driven by military necessity to commit atrocities upon the enemy; and had witnessed in the chaos of Damascus the defeat of his aspirations for the Arabs in the very moment of their triumph, their seemingly incurable factionalism rendering them incapable of becoming a nation. (Anglo-French duplicity, made official in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Lawrence knew, had already betrayed them in a cynical wartime division of expected spoils.) Distinguished and disillusioned, Lawrence left for home just before the Armistice and politely refused, at a royal audience on October 30, 1918, the Order of the Bath and the DSO, leaving the shocked king George V (in his words) “holding the box in my hand.” He was demobilized as a lieutenant colonel on July 31, 1919.
A colonel at 30, Lawrence was a private at 34. In between he lobbied vainly for Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (even appearing in Arab robes) and lobbied vainly against the detachment of Syria and Lebanon from the rest of the Arab countries as a French mandate. Meanwhile he worked on his war memoir, acquiring for the purpose a research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, effective (for a seven-year term) in November 1919. By that time his exploits were becoming belatedly known to a wide public, for in London in August 1919 an American war correspondent, Lowell Thomas, had begun an immensely popular series of illustrated lectures, “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.” The latter segment soon dominated the program, and Lawrence, curious about it, went to see it himself.
Lawrence was already on a third draft of his narrative when, in March 1921, he was wooed back to the Middle East as adviser on Arab affairs to the colonial minister, then Winston Churchill. After the Cairo political settlements, which redeemed a few of the idealistic wartime promises Lawrence had made, he rejected all offers of further positions in government; and, with the covert help of his wartime colleague, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, enlisted under an assumed name (John Hume Ross) in the Royal Air Force on Aug. 28, 1922. He had just finished arranging to have eight copies of the revised and rhetorically inflated 330,000-word text of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom run off by the press of the Oxford Times and was emotionally drained by the drafting of his memoir. Now he was willing to give up his £1,200 Colonial Office salary for the daily two shillings ninepence of an aircraftman, not only to lose himself in the ranks but to acquire material for another book. He was successful only in the latter. The London press found him at the Farnborough base, the Daily Express breaking the story on December 27. Embarrassed, the RAF released him early the next month.
Finding reinstatement impossible, Lawrence looked around for another service and through the intervention of a War Office friend, Sir Philip Chetwode, was able to enlist on March 12, 1923, as a private in the Royal Tank Corps, this time as T.E. Shaw, a name he claimed to have chosen at random, although one of the crucial events of his postwar life was his meeting in 1922, and later friendship with, George Bernard Shaw. (In 1927 he assumed the new name legally.) Posted to Bovington Camp in Dorset, he acquired a cottage nearby, Clouds Hill, which remained his home thereafter. From Dorset he set about arranging for publication of yet another version of Seven Pillars; on the editorial advice of his friends, notably George Bernard Shaw, a sizable portion of the Oxford text was pruned for the famous 128-copy subscription edition of 1926, sumptuously printed and bound and illustrated by notable British artists commissioned by the author.
Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom remains one of the few 20th-century works in English to make epical figures out of contemporaries. Though overpopulated with adjectives and often straining for effects and “art,” it is, nevertheless, an action-packed narrative of Lawrence’s campaigns in the desert with the Arabs. The book is replete with incident and spectacle, filled with rich character portrayals and a tense introspection that bares the author’s own complex mental and spiritual transformation. Though admittedly inexact and subjective, it combines the scope of heroic epic with the closeness of autobiography.
To recover the costs of printing Seven Pillars, Lawrence agreed to a trade edition of a 130,000-word abridgment, Revolt in the Desert. By the time it was released in March 1927, he was at a base in India, remote from the publicity both editions generated; yet the limelight sought him out. Unfounded rumors of his involvement as a spy in Central Asia and in a plot against the Soviet Union caused the RAF (to which he had been transferred in 1925 on the intervention of George Bernard Shaw and John Buchan with the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin) to return him to England in 1929. In the meantime, he had completed a draft of a semi-fictionalized memoir of Royal Air Force recruit training, The Mint (published 1955), which in its explicitness horrified Whitehall officialdom and which in his lifetime never went beyond circulation in typescript to his friends. In it he balanced scenes of contentment with air force life with scenes of splenetic rage at the desecration of the recruit’s essential inviolate humanity. He had also begun, on commission from the book designer Bruce Rogers, a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into English prose, a task he continued at various RAF bases from Karāchi in 1928 through Plymouth in 1931. It was published in 1932 as the work of T.E. Shaw, but posthumous printings have used both his former and adopted names.
Little else by Lawrence was published in his lifetime. His first postwar writings, including a famous essay on guerrilla war and a magazine serial version of an early draft of Seven Pillars, have been published as Evolution of a Revolt (edited by S. and R. Weintraub, 1968). Minorities (1971) reproduced an anthology of more than 100 poems Lawrence had collected in a notebook over many years, each possessing a crucial and revealing association with something in his life.
Lawrence’s last years were spent among RAF seaplanes and seagoing tenders, although officialdom refused him permission to fly. In the process, moving from bases on the English Channel to those on the North Sea and leading charismatically from the lowest ranks as Aircraftman Shaw, he worked on improved designs for high-speed seaplane-tender watercraft, testing them in rigorous trials and developing a technical manual for their use.
Discharged from the Royal Air Force on February 26, 1935, Lawrence returned to Clouds Hill to face a retirement, at 46, filled alternately with optimism about future publishing projects and a sense of emptiness. To Lady Astor, an old friend, he described himself as puttering about as if “there is something broken in the works . . . my will, I think.” A motorcycling accident on May 13 solved the problem of his future. He died six days later without regaining consciousness.
Lawrence became a mythic figure in his own lifetime even before he published his own version of his legend in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His accomplishments themselves were solid enough for several lives. More than a military leader and inspirational force behind the Arab revolt against the Turks, he was a superb tactician and a highly influential theoretician of guerrilla warfare. Besides The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his sharply etched service chronicle, The Mint, and his mannered prose translation of the Odyssey added to a literary reputation further substantiated by an immense correspondence that establishes him as one of the major letter writers of his generation.
Lawrence found despair as necessary as ambition. He lived on the masochistic side of asceticism, and part of his self-punishment involved creating within himself a deep frustration to immediately follow, and cancel out, high achievement by denying to himself the recognition he had earned. At its most extreme, this impulse involved a symbolic killing of the self, a taking up of a new life and a new name. Under whatever guise, he was a many-sided genius whose accomplishments precluded the privacy he constantly sought. By the manufacture of his myth, however solidly based, he created in his own person a characterization rivaling any in contemporary fiction.
Thomas Edward Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence of Arabia see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Shaw see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Shaw, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Thomas Edward Lawrence was known as the legendary “Lawrence of Arabia”. He earned this title from his exploits during World War I which led helped drive the Ottomans out of the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant.
T. E. Lawrence, byname Lawrence Of Arabia, was British archaeological scholar, military strategist, and author best known for his legendary war activities in the Middle East during World War I and for his account of those activities in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).
Lawrence was the son of Sir Thomas Chapman and Sara Maden, the governess of Sir Thomas’ daughters at Westmeath, with whom he had escaped from both marriage and Ireland. As “Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence,” the couple had five sons (Thomas Edward was the second) during what was outwardly a marriage with all the benefits of clergy. In 1896, the family settled in Oxford, where T.E. (he preferred the initials to the names) attended the High School and Jesus College. Medieval military architecture was his first interest, and he pursued it in its historical settings, studying crusader castles in France and (in 1909) in Syria and Palestine and submitting a thesis on the subject that won him first-class honors in history in 1910. (It was posthumously published, as Crusader Castles, in 1936.) As a protégé of the Oxford archaeologist D.G. Hogarth, he acquired a demyship (travelling fellowship) from Magdalen College and joined an expedition excavating the Hittite settlement of Carchemish on the Euphrates, working there from 1911 to 1914, first under Hogarth and then under Sir Leonard Woolley, and using his free time to travel on his own and get to know the language and the people. Early in 1914 he and Woolley, and Captain S.F. Newcombe, explored northern Sinai, on the Turkish frontier east of Suez. Supposedly a scientific expedition, and in fact sponsored by the Palestine Exploration Fund, it was more a map-making reconnaissance from Gaza to Aqaba, destined to be of almost immediate strategic value. The cover study was nevertheless of authentic scholarly significance; written by Lawrence and Woolley together, it was published as The Wilderness of Zin in 1915.
The month the war began, Lawrence became a civilian employee of the Map Department of the War Office in London, charged with preparing a militarily useful map of Sinai. By December 1914 he was a lieutenant in Cairo. Experts on Arab affairs—especially those who had travelled in the Turkish-held Arab lands—were rare, and he was assigned to intelligence, where he spent more than a year, mostly interviewing prisoners, drawing maps, receiving and processing data from agents behind enemy lines, and producing a handbook on the Turkish Army. When, in mid-1915, his brothers Will and Frank were killed in action in France, T.E. was reminded cruelly of the more active front in the West. Egypt at the time was the staging area for Middle Eastern military operations of prodigious inefficiency; a trip to Arabia convinced Lawrence of an alternative method of undermining Germany’s Turkish ally. In October 1916 he had accompanied the diplomat Ronald Storrs on a mission to Arabia, where Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, amīr of Mecca, had the previous June proclaimed a revolt against the Turks. Storrs and Lawrence consulted with Ḥusayn’s son Abdullah, and Lawrence received permission to go on to consult further with another son, Fayṣal, then commanding an Arab force southwest of Medina. Back in Cairo in November, Lawrence urged his superiors to abet the efforts at rebellion with arms and gold and to make use of the dissident shaykhs by meshing their aspirations for independence with general military strategy. He rejoined Fayṣal’s army as political and liaison officer.
Lawrence was not the only officer to become involved in the incipient Arab rising, but from his own small corner of the Arabian Peninsula he quickly became—especially from his own accounts—its brains, its organizing force, its liaison with Cairo, and its military technician. His small but irritating second front behind the Turkish lines was a hit-and-run guerrilla operation, focusing upon the mining of bridges and supply trains and the appearance of Arab units first in one place and then another, tying down enemy forces that otherwise would have been deployed elsewhere, and keeping the Damascus-to-Medina railway largely inoperable, with potential Turkish reinforcements thus helpless to crush the uprising. In such fashion Lawrence—“Amīr Dynamite” to the admiring Bedouins—committed the cynical, self-serving shaykhs for the moment to his king-maker’s vision of an Arab nation, goaded them with examples of his own self-punishing personal valor when their spirits flagged, bribed them with promises of enemy booty and English gold sovereigns.
Aqaba—at the northernmost tip of the Red Sea—was the first major victory for the Arab guerrilla forces. They seized it after a two-month march on July 6, 1917. Thenceforth, Lawrence attempted to coordinate Arab movements with the campaign of General Sir Edmund Allenby, who was advancing toward Jerusalem, a tactic only partly successful. In November, Lawrence was captured at Darʿā by the Turks while reconnoitering the area in Arab dress and was apparently recognized and homosexually brutalized before he was able to escape. The experience, variously reported or disguised by him afterward, left real scars as well as wounds upon his psyche from which he never recovered. The next month, nevertheless, he took part in the victory parade in Jerusalem and then returned to increasingly successful actions in which Fayṣal’s forces nibbled their way north, and Lawrence rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel with the Distinguished Service Order (DSO).
By the time the motley Arab army reached Damascus in October 1918, Lawrence was physically and emotionally exhausted, having forced body and spirit to the breaking point too often. He had been wounded numerous times, captured, and tortured; had endured extremities of hunger, weather, and disease; had been driven by military necessity to commit atrocities upon the enemy; and had witnessed in the chaos of Damascus the defeat of his aspirations for the Arabs in the very moment of their triumph, their seemingly incurable factionalism rendering them incapable of becoming a nation. (Anglo-French duplicity, made official in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Lawrence knew, had already betrayed them in a cynical wartime division of expected spoils.) Distinguished and disillusioned, Lawrence left for home just before the Armistice and politely refused, at a royal audience on October 30, 1918, the Order of the Bath and the DSO, leaving the shocked king George V (in his words) “holding the box in my hand.” He was demobilized as a lieutenant colonel on July 31, 1919.
A colonel at 30, Lawrence was a private at 34. In between he lobbied vainly for Arab independence at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (even appearing in Arab robes) and lobbied vainly against the detachment of Syria and Lebanon from the rest of the Arab countries as a French mandate. Meanwhile he worked on his war memoir, acquiring for the purpose a research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, effective (for a seven-year term) in November 1919. By that time his exploits were becoming belatedly known to a wide public, for in London in August 1919 an American war correspondent, Lowell Thomas, had begun an immensely popular series of illustrated lectures, “With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.” The latter segment soon dominated the program, and Lawrence, curious about it, went to see it himself.
Lawrence was already on a third draft of his narrative when, in March 1921, he was wooed back to the Middle East as adviser on Arab affairs to the colonial minister, then Winston Churchill. After the Cairo political settlements, which redeemed a few of the idealistic wartime promises Lawrence had made, he rejected all offers of further positions in government; and, with the covert help of his wartime colleague, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, enlisted under an assumed name (John Hume Ross) in the Royal Air Force on Aug. 28, 1922. He had just finished arranging to have eight copies of the revised and rhetorically inflated 330,000-word text of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom run off by the press of the Oxford Times and was emotionally drained by the drafting of his memoir. Now he was willing to give up his £1,200 Colonial Office salary for the daily two shillings ninepence of an aircraftman, not only to lose himself in the ranks but to acquire material for another book. He was successful only in the latter. The London press found him at the Farnborough base, the Daily Express breaking the story on December 27. Embarrassed, the RAF released him early the next month.
Finding reinstatement impossible, Lawrence looked around for another service and through the intervention of a War Office friend, Sir Philip Chetwode, was able to enlist on March 12, 1923, as a private in the Royal Tank Corps, this time as T.E. Shaw, a name he claimed to have chosen at random, although one of the crucial events of his postwar life was his meeting in 1922, and later friendship with, George Bernard Shaw. (In 1927 he assumed the new name legally.) Posted to Bovington Camp in Dorset, he acquired a cottage nearby, Clouds Hill, which remained his home thereafter. From Dorset he set about arranging for publication of yet another version of Seven Pillars; on the editorial advice of his friends, notably George Bernard Shaw, a sizable portion of the Oxford text was pruned for the famous 128-copy subscription edition of 1926, sumptuously printed and bound and illustrated by notable British artists commissioned by the author.
Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom remains one of the few 20th-century works in English to make epical figures out of contemporaries. Though overpopulated with adjectives and often straining for effects and “art,” it is, nevertheless, an action-packed narrative of Lawrence’s campaigns in the desert with the Arabs. The book is replete with incident and spectacle, filled with rich character portrayals and a tense introspection that bares the author’s own complex mental and spiritual transformation. Though admittedly inexact and subjective, it combines the scope of heroic epic with the closeness of autobiography.
To recover the costs of printing Seven Pillars, Lawrence agreed to a trade edition of a 130,000-word abridgment, Revolt in the Desert. By the time it was released in March 1927, he was at a base in India, remote from the publicity both editions generated; yet the limelight sought him out. Unfounded rumors of his involvement as a spy in Central Asia and in a plot against the Soviet Union caused the RAF (to which he had been transferred in 1925 on the intervention of George Bernard Shaw and John Buchan with the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin) to return him to England in 1929. In the meantime, he had completed a draft of a semi-fictionalized memoir of Royal Air Force recruit training, The Mint (published 1955), which in its explicitness horrified Whitehall officialdom and which in his lifetime never went beyond circulation in typescript to his friends. In it he balanced scenes of contentment with air force life with scenes of splenetic rage at the desecration of the recruit’s essential inviolate humanity. He had also begun, on commission from the book designer Bruce Rogers, a translation of Homer’s Odyssey into English prose, a task he continued at various RAF bases from Karāchi in 1928 through Plymouth in 1931. It was published in 1932 as the work of T.E. Shaw, but posthumous printings have used both his former and adopted names.
Little else by Lawrence was published in his lifetime. His first postwar writings, including a famous essay on guerrilla war and a magazine serial version of an early draft of Seven Pillars, have been published as Evolution of a Revolt (edited by S. and R. Weintraub, 1968). Minorities (1971) reproduced an anthology of more than 100 poems Lawrence had collected in a notebook over many years, each possessing a crucial and revealing association with something in his life.
Lawrence’s last years were spent among RAF seaplanes and seagoing tenders, although officialdom refused him permission to fly. In the process, moving from bases on the English Channel to those on the North Sea and leading charismatically from the lowest ranks as Aircraftman Shaw, he worked on improved designs for high-speed seaplane-tender watercraft, testing them in rigorous trials and developing a technical manual for their use.
Discharged from the Royal Air Force on February 26, 1935, Lawrence returned to Clouds Hill to face a retirement, at 46, filled alternately with optimism about future publishing projects and a sense of emptiness. To Lady Astor, an old friend, he described himself as puttering about as if “there is something broken in the works . . . my will, I think.” A motorcycling accident on May 13 solved the problem of his future. He died six days later without regaining consciousness.
Lawrence became a mythic figure in his own lifetime even before he published his own version of his legend in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. His accomplishments themselves were solid enough for several lives. More than a military leader and inspirational force behind the Arab revolt against the Turks, he was a superb tactician and a highly influential theoretician of guerrilla warfare. Besides The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his sharply etched service chronicle, The Mint, and his mannered prose translation of the Odyssey added to a literary reputation further substantiated by an immense correspondence that establishes him as one of the major letter writers of his generation.
Lawrence found despair as necessary as ambition. He lived on the masochistic side of asceticism, and part of his self-punishment involved creating within himself a deep frustration to immediately follow, and cancel out, high achievement by denying to himself the recognition he had earned. At its most extreme, this impulse involved a symbolic killing of the self, a taking up of a new life and a new name. Under whatever guise, he was a many-sided genius whose accomplishments precluded the privacy he constantly sought. By the manufacture of his myth, however solidly based, he created in his own person a characterization rivaling any in contemporary fiction.
Thomas Edward Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Lawrence see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Lawrence of Arabia see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
T. E. Shaw see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Shaw, T. E. see Lawrence, Thomas Edward
Laye, Camara
Laye, Camara (Camara Laye) (b. January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea] - d. February 4, 1980, Senegal). Guinean novelist. Laye comes from a Malinke family from Kouroussa, Upper Guinea. His father was a jeweller and goldsmith, his mother a smith’s daughter. A Muslim by faith, Laye attended a Qur’anic school, then the French primary school at Kouroussa. At Conakry technical college, he received a first class proficiency certificate in mechanical engineering. He was sent to France to the Central School of Automobile Engineering at Argenteuil. On his own initiative, he entered the Ecole Ampere in Paris, working for the diploma in industrial instruction. To earn a living, Laye had to work for eight months as a mechanic at the Simca works, while following evening courses at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. He finally studied for a specialized diploma in engineering at the Technical College for Aeronautics and Automobile Construction.
Laye’s literary career began in his Paris student days. Unlike most other African writers -- some of whom have adversely criticized Laye -- Laye is politically non-partisan, and remarkable rather for his psychological insight. His first book, L’enfant noir (The Dark Child) (1953) is an autobiographical novel for which Laye, still a student in Paris, was awarded the Charles Veillon prize. It is remarkable for its picture of the traditions of Malinke civilization. Laye’s second novel, Le regard du roi (The Radiance of the King) (1954) is an allegory about man’s search for God, written in a colloquial griot style, in which the adventures of the hero are developed in a narrative sometimes comic, sometimes touching, and always with immense verve.
Camara Laye (born January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea]; d. February 4, 1980, Senegal) was an African writer from Guinea. During his time at college he wrote The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood. He would later become a writer of many essays and was a foe of the government of Guinea. His novel The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi) is considered to be one of his most important works.
Camara Laye was born Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity) into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His family name is Camara, and following the tradition of his community, it precedes his given name -- Laye. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both the Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fourteen he went to Conakry, capital of Guinea, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studies in mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalauréat.
In 1953, he published his first novel, L'Enfant noir (The African Child, 1954, also published under the title The Dark Child), an autobiographical story, which narrates in the first person a journey from childhood in Kouroussa, through challenges in Conakry, to France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed by Le Regard du roi (1954; The Radiance of the King, 1956). These two novels are among the very earliest major works in francophone African literature.
In 1956, Camara returned to Africa, first to Dahomey (now Benin), then Gold Coast (now Ghana) and then to newly independent Guinea, where he held government posts. In 1965, he left Guinea for Dakar, Senegal because of political issues. In 1966 his third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa, 1968), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work was published, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word, 1980), based on a Malian epic, as told by the griot Babou Condé, about the famous Sundiata Keita (also spelled Sunjata), the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire.
In 1975 Laye became acutely ill with a kidney condition that had first troubled him back in 1965, but he could not afford the treatment in Europe that he needed. Reine Carducci, wife of the Italian UNESCO ambassador to Senegal and an admirer of Laye's work, became conscious of Laye's plight and championed an appeal for financial support. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president of the Ivory Coast, made the largest contribution; Laye later wrote his biography and expressed his admiration for the leader. Laye received the necessary medical care in Paris and returned periodically for further treatment.
In 1971, Laye began writing Le Maître de la parole (1978). Though eschewing collaboration with the many exiled enemies of Touré, Laye in an interview did not hide his debt to Kafka and the surrealists and his intention to mingle fiction and reality into a new and greater truth in the effort to express his own outrage at what had happened to his homeland. An honest artist and a sensitive participant in the pains of a post-colonial world, Laye produced works that speak about the clamor and that are more poignant because of their intense dream-like style. Eventually, Laye's ill health caught up with him and he died on February 4, 1980, in Dakar, Senegal, where he is buried.
Laye, Camara (Camara Laye) (b. January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea] - d. February 4, 1980, Senegal). Guinean novelist. Laye comes from a Malinke family from Kouroussa, Upper Guinea. His father was a jeweller and goldsmith, his mother a smith’s daughter. A Muslim by faith, Laye attended a Qur’anic school, then the French primary school at Kouroussa. At Conakry technical college, he received a first class proficiency certificate in mechanical engineering. He was sent to France to the Central School of Automobile Engineering at Argenteuil. On his own initiative, he entered the Ecole Ampere in Paris, working for the diploma in industrial instruction. To earn a living, Laye had to work for eight months as a mechanic at the Simca works, while following evening courses at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts. He finally studied for a specialized diploma in engineering at the Technical College for Aeronautics and Automobile Construction.
Laye’s literary career began in his Paris student days. Unlike most other African writers -- some of whom have adversely criticized Laye -- Laye is politically non-partisan, and remarkable rather for his psychological insight. His first book, L’enfant noir (The Dark Child) (1953) is an autobiographical novel for which Laye, still a student in Paris, was awarded the Charles Veillon prize. It is remarkable for its picture of the traditions of Malinke civilization. Laye’s second novel, Le regard du roi (The Radiance of the King) (1954) is an allegory about man’s search for God, written in a colloquial griot style, in which the adventures of the hero are developed in a narrative sometimes comic, sometimes touching, and always with immense verve.
Camara Laye (born January 1, 1928, Kouroussa, French Guinea [now in Guinea]; d. February 4, 1980, Senegal) was an African writer from Guinea. During his time at college he wrote The African Child (L'Enfant noir), a novel based loosely on his own childhood. He would later become a writer of many essays and was a foe of the government of Guinea. His novel The Radiance of the King (Le Regard du roi) is considered to be one of his most important works.
Camara Laye was born Malinke (a Mandé speaking ethnicity) into a caste that traditionally worked as blacksmiths and goldsmiths. His family name is Camara, and following the tradition of his community, it precedes his given name -- Laye. His mother was from the village of Tindican, and his immediate childhood surroundings were not predominantly influenced by French culture. He attended both the Koranic and French elementary schools in Kouroussa. At age fourteen he went to Conakry, capital of Guinea, to continue his education. He attended vocational studies in motor mechanics. In 1947, he travelled to Paris to continue studies in mechanics. There he worked and took further courses in engineering and worked towards the baccalauréat.
In 1953, he published his first novel, L'Enfant noir (The African Child, 1954, also published under the title The Dark Child), an autobiographical story, which narrates in the first person a journey from childhood in Kouroussa, through challenges in Conakry, to France. The book won the Prix Charles Veillon in 1954. L'Enfant noir was followed by Le Regard du roi (1954; The Radiance of the King, 1956). These two novels are among the very earliest major works in francophone African literature.
In 1956, Camara returned to Africa, first to Dahomey (now Benin), then Gold Coast (now Ghana) and then to newly independent Guinea, where he held government posts. In 1965, he left Guinea for Dakar, Senegal because of political issues. In 1966 his third novel, Dramouss (A Dream of Africa, 1968), was published. In 1978 his fourth and final work was published, Le Maître de la parole - Kouma Lafôlô Kouma (The Guardian of the Word, 1980), based on a Malian epic, as told by the griot Babou Condé, about the famous Sundiata Keita (also spelled Sunjata), the thirteenth-century founder of the Mali Empire.
In 1975 Laye became acutely ill with a kidney condition that had first troubled him back in 1965, but he could not afford the treatment in Europe that he needed. Reine Carducci, wife of the Italian UNESCO ambassador to Senegal and an admirer of Laye's work, became conscious of Laye's plight and championed an appeal for financial support. Félix Houphouët-Boigny, president of the Ivory Coast, made the largest contribution; Laye later wrote his biography and expressed his admiration for the leader. Laye received the necessary medical care in Paris and returned periodically for further treatment.
In 1971, Laye began writing Le Maître de la parole (1978). Though eschewing collaboration with the many exiled enemies of Touré, Laye in an interview did not hide his debt to Kafka and the surrealists and his intention to mingle fiction and reality into a new and greater truth in the effort to express his own outrage at what had happened to his homeland. An honest artist and a sensitive participant in the pains of a post-colonial world, Laye produced works that speak about the clamor and that are more poignant because of their intense dream-like style. Eventually, Laye's ill health caught up with him and he died on February 4, 1980, in Dakar, Senegal, where he is buried.
Layth ibn Sa‘d, al-
Layth ibn Sa‘d, al- (713-791). Transmitter of hadith and a jurisconsult of Persian origin in Egypt. He is ranked among the leading authorities on questions of religious knowledge in the early years of the Islamic Empire.
Layth ibn Sa‘d, al- (713-791). Transmitter of hadith and a jurisconsult of Persian origin in Egypt. He is ranked among the leading authorities on questions of religious knowledge in the early years of the Islamic Empire.
Laz
Laz (Lazi) (Lazepe) (Lazlar) (C'ani). People of South Caucasian stock, now dwelling in the southeastern corner of the shores of the Black Sea, in the region called in Ottoman times Lazistan.
The Laz (Lazi are an ethnic group who live primarily on the Black Sea coastal regions of Turkey and Georgia. One of the chief tribes of ancient kingdom of Colchis, the Laz were initially early adopters of Christianity, and most of them subsequently converted to Sunni Islam during Ottoman rule of Caucasus in the 16th century.
The Laz of Turkey form two principal groups. One of these are indigenous to the eastern Black Sea province formerly known as Lazistan (modern Rize and Artvin provinces). The other group fled the Russian expansion later in the 19th century and settled in Adapazarı, Sapanca, Yalova and Bursa, in western and eastern parts of the Black Sea and Marmara regions, respectively. The Laz speak the Laz language, related to Mingrelian, Georgian and Svan (South Caucasian languages). Laz identity in Georgia has largely merged with a Georgian identity and the meaning of "Laz" is seen as merely a regional category, and are mainly concentrated in Ajaria.
The Laz were converted to Christianity while living under the Byzantine Empire and kingdom of Colchis. During the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of Laz became Sunni Muslims of Hanafi madh'hab, and were ruled as part of the Lazistan sanjak. There is also a very limited number of Christian Laz in Georgia. The Laz are primarily designated as fisherfolk by the Turkish public (in fact, they are mostly farmers of tea and maize) because anchovies constitute an important part of their diet.
Lazi see Laz
Lazepe see Laz
Lazlar see Laz
C'ani see Laz
Laz (Lazi) (Lazepe) (Lazlar) (C'ani). People of South Caucasian stock, now dwelling in the southeastern corner of the shores of the Black Sea, in the region called in Ottoman times Lazistan.
The Laz (Lazi are an ethnic group who live primarily on the Black Sea coastal regions of Turkey and Georgia. One of the chief tribes of ancient kingdom of Colchis, the Laz were initially early adopters of Christianity, and most of them subsequently converted to Sunni Islam during Ottoman rule of Caucasus in the 16th century.
The Laz of Turkey form two principal groups. One of these are indigenous to the eastern Black Sea province formerly known as Lazistan (modern Rize and Artvin provinces). The other group fled the Russian expansion later in the 19th century and settled in Adapazarı, Sapanca, Yalova and Bursa, in western and eastern parts of the Black Sea and Marmara regions, respectively. The Laz speak the Laz language, related to Mingrelian, Georgian and Svan (South Caucasian languages). Laz identity in Georgia has largely merged with a Georgian identity and the meaning of "Laz" is seen as merely a regional category, and are mainly concentrated in Ajaria.
The Laz were converted to Christianity while living under the Byzantine Empire and kingdom of Colchis. During the rule of the Ottoman Empire, the vast majority of Laz became Sunni Muslims of Hanafi madh'hab, and were ruled as part of the Lazistan sanjak. There is also a very limited number of Christian Laz in Georgia. The Laz are primarily designated as fisherfolk by the Turkish public (in fact, they are mostly farmers of tea and maize) because anchovies constitute an important part of their diet.
Lazi see Laz
Lazepe see Laz
Lazlar see Laz
C'ani see Laz
Lazar
Lazar (Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović) (Tsar Lazar) (1329 - June 28 [O. S. June 15], 1389). King of Serbia who was defeated by Ottomans at Kosovo in 1389. Lazar died in 1389.
Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović, also known as Tsar Lazar, was a medieval Serbian knez (Knyaz), ruler of Moravian Serbia, a part of the once powerful Serbian Empire under Dušan the Mighty. Lazar fought at the Battle of Kosovo with an army half the size of the Ottoman Empire and perished, together with most of the Serbian nobility and Murad I, which eventually led to the fall of Serbia as a sovereign state. The Battle of Kosovo is regarded as highly important for Serb national consciousness and the knez is venerated as a saint in the Serbian Orthodox Church and a hero in Serbian epic poetry.
Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović see Lazar
Hrebelianovic, Stefan Lazar see Lazar
Tsar Lazar see Lazar
Lazar (Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović) (Tsar Lazar) (1329 - June 28 [O. S. June 15], 1389). King of Serbia who was defeated by Ottomans at Kosovo in 1389. Lazar died in 1389.
Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović, also known as Tsar Lazar, was a medieval Serbian knez (Knyaz), ruler of Moravian Serbia, a part of the once powerful Serbian Empire under Dušan the Mighty. Lazar fought at the Battle of Kosovo with an army half the size of the Ottoman Empire and perished, together with most of the Serbian nobility and Murad I, which eventually led to the fall of Serbia as a sovereign state. The Battle of Kosovo is regarded as highly important for Serb national consciousness and the knez is venerated as a saint in the Serbian Orthodox Church and a hero in Serbian epic poetry.
Stefan Lazar Hrebeljanović see Lazar
Hrebelianovic, Stefan Lazar see Lazar
Tsar Lazar see Lazar
Lazreg, Marnia
Marnia Lazreg (b. January 10, 1941, Mostaganem, French Algeria - d. January 13, 2024, Manhattan, New York City, New York) was an Algerian academic. She was a specialist in the Muslim world, particularly on Muslim women. Her best-known work is Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women.
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