Mornings in Mexico

'If you read only one book of travellers' tales on Mexico, it must be this one. A magnificent blood-and-ganglion pagan response to the primeval savagery south of the Rio Grande.' - Frank McLynn, Top Ten Books, The Guardian
Much of D.H. Lawrence's life was defined by his passion for travel, and it was those peripatetic wanderings that gave life to some of his greatest novels. In the 1920s Lawrence travelled several times to Mexico, where he was fascinated by the clash of beauty and brutality, purity and darkness that he observed there.
The diverse and evocative essays that make up Mornings in Mexico - A Little Moonshine with Lemon, Dance of the Sprouting Corn, Corasmin and the Parrots - wander from an admiring portrayal of the Indian way of life to a visit to the studio of Diego Rivera. They are brightly adorned with simple and evocative details sharply observed: piles of fruit in a village market, strolls in a courtyard filled with hibiscus and roses, the play of light on an adobe wall.
It was during his time in Mexico that Lawrence re-wrote The Plumed Serpent, which is infused with his own experiences there. To read Mornings in Mexico is thus to discover the inspiration behind of one of Lawrence's most loved works and to be immersed in a portrait of the country like no other.

D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was a novelist, poet, playwright, painter, critic and an icon of 20th-century literature. He began writing at an early age, publishing his first novel, The White Peacock, when he was twenty-five, Sons and Lovers two years later and The Rainbow and Women in Love in his thirties. His hatred of militarism, openly expressed during the First World War, stirred a wave of vilification that forced him to leave England and embark on what he called his 'Savage Pilgrimage'.
He spent the remainder of his life traveling - to Italy, Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon), Australia, America, Mexico and the South of France - and it was during this time that he wrote such classics as Sea and Sardinia, The Plumed Serpent and Lady Chatterley's Lover.
With the exception of E.M. Forster, who called him 'the greatest novelist of our generation', and friends such as Aldous Huxley, Lawrence's obituarists were mostly dismissive or hostile. It was not until the Lady Chatterley trial thirty years after his death and the subsequent publication of the book that Lawrence was finally recognised as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of his age.