With hindsight, it is easy to see why a slim, self-effacing Englishman named Thomas Edward Lawrence became one of this century's most ballyhooed celebrities. Out of the appalling carnage of World War I - the mud-caked anonymity of the trenches, the hail of mechanized death that spewed from machine guns and fell from airplanes - there emerged a lone Romantic, framed heroically against the clean desert sands of Arabia. U.S. journalist Lowell Thomas was the first to recognize that Lawrence's wartime work - organizing disparate Arab tribes into armed revolt against the occupying Turks, allies of Germany - had pop-myth possibilities. Thomas' publicity essentially created the figure known as Lawrence of Arabia, but others contributed to the saga. Robert Graves wrote a life of Lawrence that appeared in 1927, when its subject was only 39. Lawrence told his own story in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which was published shortly after his death from a motorcycle accident in 1935. Since then, the Lawrence legend has thrived through a steady stream of biographies and memoirs. ... He would be easier to understand if he were simply larger than life or what his detractors claimed: a self-aggrandizing charlatan. But he took no pleasure in his notoriety; he ran from it. The Selected Letters adds another interpretation to an already overwrought tale. The age demanded a hero, Lawrence qualified, and the 20th century then got what it deserved: a loner, an ascetic, a man who might have been happier as a medieval monk than as the public cynosure he became. No paragon in his own eyes, Lawrence nonetheless remains a haunting presence in the contemporary consciousness, an indissoluble mixture of weaknesses and strength.