It describes his time in the Royal Air Force, working, despite having held senior rank in the army (colonel), as an ordinary aircraftman, under an assumed name, 352087 Ross.

Lawrence appears to have wanted to have his past life and fame obliterated, when he wrote to Edward Garnett:[3] "The Air Force is not a man-crushing humiliating slavery, all its days.

[4]: 9  Lawrence's brother took the further precaution of substituting "new names" in the expurgated edition for characters in A/c Ross's squad "in all passages which might have caused embarrassment or distress".

"[5] In fact a limited edition of no more than 50 copies was published to protect United States copyright in 1936 by Doubleday, Doran and Company in Garden City, New York, probably around November, under Lawrence's pseudonym.

The delay in publication and sensitivity surrounding the full text mainly concerned its barrack-room language (i.e., many "four-letter words") and frank references to bodily functions, which some people might still find offensive.

[8] The critic Irving Howe described Lawrence's The Mint in The Hudson Review as a "severely chiselled picture of barrack life: Joycean in style, sometimes brilliant in evocation, structured as a series of set-pieces, showing a decided advance in control over The Seven Pillars of Wisdom but too markedly an exercise, a self-conscious effort to write.