Biography Essay

Malcolm Lowry's reputation rests largely on a single novel, Under the Volcano (1947), the semiautobiographical account of an expatriate Englishman's disintegration through despair and dipsomania in Mexico at the end of the 1930s. Although hailed by some reviewers as a masterpiece, the book was slow to win acceptance as a major modern work. Lowry found it impossible to repeat the virtuoso writing and dazzling intensity of vision which are to be found in this novel, and some of the book's leading themes—exile, alienation, failure, self-destruction—became synonymous with the subsequent course of his life. It is sometimes difficult to separate the colorful and romantic legend of Lowry the alcoholic and suicide from the plots of his fiction, which repeatedly explore the sufferings of a disturbed and selfdoubting individual who is often a writer. Lowry ended his life in obscurity, having succeeded in finding a...