John Worthen was born in London and educated at Cambridge and the Universities of Cambridge and Kent.  He taught at Charlottesville and Swansea before writing D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 for Cambridge University Press and editing a number of Lawrence’s works for the Cambridge Lawrence Edition.   He became Professor of D. H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham in 1994 but took early retirement in order to write.  He has published a composite biography (The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons and the Wordsworths in 1802, Yale University Press, 2001), as well as a commercial biography (D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, Penguin Books, 2005) and the biography of a non-literary figure (Robert Schumann: Life and Death of a Musician, Yale University Press, 2007).  In 2009, Haus Books will be publishing his new short life of T. S. Eliot.  He is also working on an Introduction to Coleridge for Cambridge University Press and on a biography of Frieda Lawrence.