First American edition. ‘Here in one volume are four hundred and seventy of the most interesting and revealing letters Lawrence wrote between 1905 and 1935 – fully two-thirds of them never before published. Malcolm Brown had the full cooperation of the Lawrence trustees who have given him access to a wealth of correspondence that had been embargoed or suppressed for some fifty years’ (dustwrapper blurb). This selection by Malcolm Brown, the co-author with Julia Cave of A Touch of Genius: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (London, 1988) and editor of a number of works by or about Lawrence, replaced David Garnett’s 1938 edition of The Letters as the largest collection of Lawrence’s letters published. It was first published in London in 1988, to coincide with the centenary of Lawrence’s birth, and this American edition, which unfortunately misspelt the editor’s name on the title-page, was issued in the following year.

This copy is from the library of the distinguished Lawrence scholar Jeremy Wilson, the editor of T.E. Lawrence’s Minorities (London, 1971), and the author of the National Portrait Gallery catalogue T.E. Lawrence: Lawrence of Arabia (London, 1988) and the authoritative biography Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorised Biography of T.E. Lawrence (London, 1989), the first and second of which are listed in Brown’s ‘Select Bibliography’ on p. 547. Wilson was also the editor of the Whittington Press edition of Lawrence’s Letters to E.T. Leeds (Andoversford, 1988), some of which were included by Brown in this edition (cf. p. 5), and the co-founder, with his wife Nicole, of the Castle Hill Press, which has published scholarly editions of works by Lawrence and the definitive series of Lawrence’s letters, which superseded this collection. Wilson and Brown were the joint historical advisers to the Imperial War Museum for the exhibition T.E. Lawrence, the Life, the Legend (2005-2006).

O’Brien A267.