Written in the years following World War I and set in postwar England and Italy, Aaron's Rod questions many of the accepted social and political institutions of Lawrence's generation, and raises issues as valid for our own time as they were for his. The novel's hero is an Everyman who flees the destruction in England and his failing marriage and who, like Lawrence himself, becomes absorbed in discovering and understanding the nature of the political and religious ideologies that shaped western civilization. Aaron's Rod was completed in 1921 and was censored by both Lawrence's American and English publishers. (Goodreads)
David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was an English writer and poet. His collected works represent, among other things, an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation. Some of the issues Lawrence explores are sexuality, emotional health, vitality, spontaneity, and instinct. Lawrence's opinions earned him many enemies and he endured official persecution, censorship, and misrepresentation of his creative work throughout the second half of his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile he called his "savage pilgrimage". At the time of his death, his public reputation was that of a pornographer who had wasted his considerable talents. E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation." (Wikipedia)