David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930) was, and remains, a highly controversial outsider, never quite assimilable to successive orthodoxies. Born with weak lungs and the lifelong expectation of an early death, and having internalised in childhood the conflicting pressures of his parents, he had what some psychologists call a 'skinless' sensitivity. While this made him on occasion a 'difficult' person socially and domestically, it also contributed to his unique characteristic as man and writer: the intensity of his existence in the passing moment. For this reason, he represents a strong conception of the novel, which, although it commands widespread theoretical assent, can be controversial in practice. His own practice is illuminating in its very unevenness and occasional extremity, for these arise from his being always something more than a novelist. In his own words, he was 'a passionately religious man', which does not mean the adherent of a sect but having a fundamental conviction about the human relation to the cosmos. In this respect, the meditation on Being in a philosopher such as Martin Heidegger provides a significant analogue. At the same time, the novel was his crucial arena for testing his shifting insights into human and non-human existence, and the sequence of his novels therefore provides the best structure through which to understand the shape of his oeuvre. Accordingly, what follows is a survey of his novelistic career and personal life leading to reflections on the nature and significance of his writing.