| LC control no. | no2018116309 |
|---|---|
| Descriptive conventions | rda |
| Personal name heading | Lawrence, T. E. (Thomas Edward), 1888-1935. Seven pillars of wisdom |
| Other standard no. | Q24323 |
| Form of work | Autobiographies |
| Ending date | 1922 |
| Place of origin | Paris (France) |
| Found in | Lawrence, T. E. Seven pillars of wisdom, 1935: title page (T.E. Lawrence) page 21-23 (Manuscripts: Text I. I wrote books 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 10 in Paris, February-June 1919. The introduction was written ... in July and August 1919. Afterwards in England I wrote book 1 then lost all but the Introduction and drafts of books 9 and 10 at Reading Station, about Christmas, 1919. Text II. A month or so later I began, in London, to scribble out what I remembered of the first text. The Introduction was still available. The other ten books I completed in less than 3 months. Text II came to over 400,000 words. I corrected it at intervals throughout 1920; it became substantially complete and accurate. All but one page of this text was burned by me in 1922. Text III was begun in London, and worked on there, in Jeddah, and in Amman during 1921, and again in London till February 1922. It is nearly 330,000 words long. Privately printed texts: Oxford 1922. Text III, for security's sake, was set up and printed textually, in sheets, at Oxford in the first quarter of 1922. Subscribers' Text, I. xii. 26. This text, as issued to subscribers in December 1926 and January 1927, was a recension of the Oxford sheets of 1922. They were condensed during 1923 and 1924. By excising 3 per cent and condensing the rest of the Oxford text a total reduction of 15 per cent was achieved, and the length of the subscribers' text brought down to some 280,000 words. Published texts: New York text. A proof of the subscribers' text was sent to New York, and reprinted there by the George Doran Publishing Company. This was necessary to ensure U.S.A. copyright. Revolt in the Desert. This abridgement of the Seven Pillars contains about 130,000 words. It was made by myself in 1926, with the minimum of necessary adjustment to preserve sense and continuity. The whole was published in England and in the U.S. in March 1927) Wikipedia, August, 28, 2018 (Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account of the experiences of British soldier T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia"), while serving as a liaison officer during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks of 1916 to 1918. It was completed in February 1922, but first published in December 1926. By December 1919, he had a fair draft of most of the ten books but lost it; Lawrence refers to this version as "Text I"; in early 1920, Lawrence set about rewriting as much as he could remember of the first version. Working from memory alone completed the "Text II", 400,000 words long, in three months. Lawrence described this version as "substantially complete and accurate". This manuscript, titled by Lawrence "The Arab Revolt," is held by the Harry Ransom Center with a letter from Lawrence's brother authenticating it as the earliest surviving manuscript of what would become Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence worked on a polished version ("Text III") during1921; completed this text comprising 335,000 words in February 1922. To eliminate any risk of losing the manuscript, got it typeset and printed on a proofing press at the Oxford Times printing works; eight copies were produced; In bibliographical terms the result was the first "edition" of Seven Pillars (because the text was reproduced on a printing press). Lawrence retained ownership of all the copies. The proof-printing became known as the "Oxford Text". Lawrence couldn't afford to have the proof corrected so it contains innumerable transcription errors, and in places lines and even whole paragraphs are missing. He made corrections by hand in five of the copies and had them bound. By mid-1922, the psychological after-effects of war were taking their toll on Lawrence; his friends persuaded him to produce an abridged version of Seven Pillars. He set to trimming the 1922 text down to 250,000 words for a subscribers' edition. The Subscribers' Edition--in a limited print run of about 200 copies--was published in late 1926, with the subtitle A Triumph. It was printed in London by Roy Manning Pike and Herbert John Hodgson, with illustrations. The Subscribers' Edition was 25% shorter than the Oxford Text; after producing the Subscribers' Edition Lawrence faced bankruptcy; forced to undertake a more stringent pruning to produce a version for sale to the general public: this was the 1927 Revolt in the Desert, a work of some 130,000 words; it received wide acclaim by the public and critics alike, the vast majority of whom had never seen or read the unabridged Subscribers' Edition. After the 1926 release of the Subscribers' Edition, Lawrence stated that no further issue of Seven Pillars would be made during his lifetime. Lawrence was killed in a motorcycle accident in May 1935, at the age of 46, and within weeks of his death, the 1926 abridgement was published for general circulation. The unabridged Oxford Text of 1922 was not published until 1997, when it appeared as a "best text" edited by Jeremy Wilson from the manuscript in the Bodleian Library and Lawrence's amended copy of the 1922 proof printing. Wilson made some further minor amendments in a new edition published in 2003) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Pillars_of_Wisdom> Wikidata, August 28, 2018 ( Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Q24323); language: English; autobiography of British soldier T. E. Lawrence; also known as: Revolt in the Desert, 7 pillars, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 7 pillars of wisdom) |
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