From adolescence, it seems, Lowry had the duties of a writer thrust upon him. He began taking his own writing seriously in boarding school. Lowry was born in 1909 in Cheshire, the son of a well-off cotton broker. Later, as alcoholism overtook him, he might better be described as a wanderer. So long as his youthful energy lasted, he was an avid traveler. Before entering Cambridge University he went to sea again, as a stoker aboard a Norwegian freighter. While still a schoolboy he shipped as an ordinary seaman to the Far East, an upper-middle-class youth from a world quite different from that of his shipmates. It was autobiographical at the same time, and his life was adventurous. All of Lowry’s writing had an element of the surreal, furthered by its psychological intensity and maybe by Lowry’s regular intoxication. It was Malcolm Lowry’s second published novel and the last he lived to see in print. Under the Volcano was rejected by twelve different publishers before being accepted by Reynal & Hitchcock in New York s and Jonathan Cape in London. When we call their work “defining,” we recognize that to a degree it is the era, a historical act within it, an aspect of its consciousness and conscience. In fact, the work of artists like Lowry does more than represent the era in which it was composed. Without question Lowry was one of the writers whose work possessed the elegance and insight to define its time.

For many readers it ranks with the best work of Joyce, Conrad, and Hemingway. Over ten years, much of it spent in a series of shanties on a beach in British Columbia, Lowry worked it into one of the great novels of the twentieth century.

Lowry’s first version of it was a loosely constructed story about Britons who witness a violent crime in Mexico. Two thousand nine is the centennial year of Malcolm Lowry, the British novelist and poet, whose extraordinary novel Under the Volcano appeared in 1947.

1947 novel by malcolm lowry