Lady Chatterley's Lover Mass market paperback - 1959

D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover holds the distinguished title of being one the most banned books in history. Infamous for its explicit descriptions of sex and other vulgarities, it was only published openly in the United Kingdom in 1960. The book focused on the illicit affair between an upper-class woman and her lower-class gamekeeper, and it was received with outrage and intrigue, resulting in numerous abridged versions being published throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

Because the first edition was so quickly banned from public consumption, there are many abridged and censored versions available, though few are as valuable as the original.

The first printings were bound with brown boards with an insignia of a phoenix gracing its front cover. The phoenix has remained a potent symbol for the book, in large part because of the book's victory in the infamous British Obscenity Trial in 1960.

D.H. Lawrence was a well-known English author who wrote many novels, short stories, and books of poetry. Not just an author, Lawrence was also a well-respected literary critic who wrote several essays regarding other famous writers, including Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.

Inspired by the long-standing affair between Frieda, Lawrence's German wife, and an Italian peasant who eventually became her third husband, Lady Chatterley's Lover is the story of Constance Chatterley, who, while trapped in an unhappy marriage to an aristocratic mine owner whose war wounds have left him paralyzed and impotent, has an affair with Mellors, the gamekeeper. Frank Kermode calls the book Lawrence's "great achievement" and Anais Nin describes it as "artistically . . . his best novel."This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition includes the transcript of the judge's decision in the famous 1959 obscenity trial that allowed the novel to be published in the United States.From the Trade Paperback edition.