Biography Essay

A follower in the footsteps of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, Lawrence Durrell explored in his novels the quintessential concerns of the twentieth century: space, time, consciousness, sexuality, and identity. Equally at home in all the genres of literature, he employed fiction to continue the structural experiments and investigations of the literary generation which preceded him, while at the same time producing a body of work that is lusty, vital, and affective. Durrell was a writer, a philosopher, and an experiencer who scorned the sterility of contemporary existence, which he called "the English death." He was concerned with the inner spaces of the psyche, with the few levels of the human being's encounter with another which he could call valuable, and with the realities of physical experience. Without doubt a maverick within the artistic establishment, Durrell was at the same time a paradox: an exile...