Lawrence of Arabia: The Life, the Legend

Lawrence's story told through his own photographs, paintings, drawings, and ephemera, all supported by quotations from his mesmerizing firsthand account of his experiences.

From the moment that Alexander Korda first set out to turn T. E. Lawrence's life into a movie not long after Lawrence's death in 1935 (a passion that only became a reality in the 1960s through other hands in Peter O'Toole's riveting performance), the mythic figure of the man on the camel enacting a heroic dream has captured the imagination of each succeeding generation.

Now, seventy years after Lawrence's death and at a time when the Middle Eastern setting in which he acquired fame is constantly in the news, this visual biography takes us inside the mind of a man of extraordinary energy, ability, and charisma. Lawrence seemed to have everything in his hands, only to throw it all away and turn his life into an obsessive quest for anonymity and sanctuary.

Fiercely ambitious, yet ambivalent about recognition, Lawrence had a brilliant academic career at Oxford before the First World War. Army intelligence work in Egypt in the early years of the war was the prelude to his participation in Emir Feisal's great Arab revolt against the Ottomans, fame at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and work with Winston Churchill after the war. But then came a relentless, restless, self-abasing search for obscurity under assumed names, followed by a mysterious motorcycle crash and death at the age of forty-six. 180 illustrations, 80 in color.