Narrative
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
T. E. Lawrence · 1926
Opening lines
Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven.
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
A twenty-eight-year-old British officer is sent in 1916 to Faisal, son of the sharif of Mecca in revolt against the Turks, as a liaison officer. He distributes British gold, crosses with Auda's Howeitat the desert of El Houl as far as Wadi Sirhan, and takes Aqaba from the landward side, the side that was not guarded. He writes that he saw that the promises made to the Arabs would be only paper if the war was won, and that he nevertheless assured them that England would keep its word.
Context
The first manuscript was lost in 1919 at Reading station, while changing trains, and the book was rewritten from memory; the text completed in 1922 was printed in eight copies by an Oxford newspaper, not for sale. A subscription at thirty guineas was to fund a print run of about a hundred: one hundred and seventy complete copies appeared in December 1926, on a reduced text, each bound differently, and the venture, which cost thirteen thousand pounds, left its author on the brink of bankruptcy. In 1927 he drew an abridgement from it to pay his debts, but refused any regular edition of the complete text during his lifetime; it appeared in 1935, a few weeks after his death.
Who it is for
More than eight hundred pages in each of its French translations, the first from 1936, the most recent from 2009.
Prizes and reception
Initially reserved for subscribers, the book reached the general public only through the abridgement, a bookshop success, and then through the posthumous edition.
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