John Worthen (born June 1943) taught at universities in North America and Wales before becoming Professor of D.H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham, where he remains Emeritus Professor.^[1] His inaugural lecture as Professor of D.H. Lawrence Studies was published under the title Cold Hearts and Coronets.^[2] His career as Lawrence’s biographer began in the 1980s and culminated in the celebrated D.H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885–1912, the first part of the definitive three-volume Cambridge biography (Cambridge University Press, 1991–98). Material from this project later formed the foundation of Worthen's single-volume study, D.H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (2005).

Though based in Lawrence’s hometown of Nottingham, he has researched and travelled around the world to complete this portrait of the writer.^{[citation needed]} In 2001 he published a group biography of the Wordsworth-Coleridge circle, The Gang: Coleridge, the Hutchinsons, and the Wordsworths in 1802; in 2007 he published a life of the musician Robert Schumann and since then has completed a short biography of T.S. Eliot (2009), an Introduction to Samuel Taylor Coleridge for Cambridge University Press (2011), a volume of unpublished^{[clarification needed]} lectures on D.H. Lawrence entitled Experiments (2012), a biography of William Wordsworth (2014), and a biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2019). A short book, Shelley Drowns (2019), covers Shelley's last days; his first novel, 'Young Frieda', offers a two-part fictional development of the lives of Ernest Weekley and Frieda Lawrence. In 2022 followed his first book of history, following up an interest lasting over the previous fifty years: 'Regicide: The Trials of Henry Marten' describes for the first time the life of Marten.

In addition to this biographical work, Worthen has edited or co-edited seven individual volumes in The Cambridge Edition of the Letters and Works of D.H. Lawrence series and is a member of the editorial board of the edition.