English novelist, short story writer, and poet, who is best known for his book Under the Volcano (1947), a 20th century classic. Like many of Malcolm Lowry's publications, the novel is highly autobiographical. An alcoholic, Lowry spent his post-Volcano years drinking and planning a cycle of novels built around his masterwork. He lived from 1940 to 1954 in a primitive cabin in Dollarton, British Columbia, and then in Italy and England until his death.

"Half-way across the bridge he stopped; he lit a new cigarette from the one he'd been smoking, and leaned over the parapet, looking down. It was too dark to see the bottom, but: here was finality indeed, and cleavage! Quauhnahuac was like the times in this respect, wherever you turned the abyss was waiting for you round the corner. Dormitory for vultures and city Moloch! When Christ was being crucified, so ran the sea-borne, hieratic legend, the earth had opened all through this country, though the coincidence could hardly have impressed anyone then!" (Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry, with an introduction by Bill Gaston, Penguin: Toronto, 2014, p. 15; first published by Jonathan Cape in London, 1947)

Malcolm Lowry was born in Birkenhead, Chesire, England, the son of Arthur Lowry, a wealthy Liverpool cotton broker, and Evelyn Bowden Lowry. She had wanted a daughter and left young Malcolm in the care of a series of nannies. Arthur owned plantations in Egypt, Peru, and Texas. Lowry's grandfather from his mother's side was a Norwegian sea captain, who went down with his ship in the Bay of Bengal. Lowry is an old Scottish name for fox; another meaning is a crafty person.

At the age of sevent, Lowry went almost blind from a disorder of the corneas, but recovered his sight four years later after an operation. Like his three brothers, Lowry attended public boarding schools. He was educated at Caldicote School, Hertfordshire, and at the Leys school, Cambridge. At the age of fifteen, he won a championship in golf in junior series.

"A ship long laid up is a filthy thing
Cabled with rust, debris of the shore gang,
Filters gangrened, only a homesick tang
Reminds us of our longed-for suffering:
The sea! The watches pass, the hours take wing
Like seagulls stuffed with bread. Tin-tin; pang-pang.
And this monotony is our Sturm und Drang
Of which few poets have the heart to sing."
('Look Out! The Bloody Bosun,' in Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Earle Birney with the assistance of Margerie Lowry, preface by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2017, p. 4)

Rebelling against his bourgeois upbringing, Lowry interrupted his academic studies and run away to sea. He worked as a deckhand on a freighter bound for the Far East and on a ship sailing to Oslo. One of Lowry's affairs in Norway was to meet the writer Nordahl Grieg, who lived in Oslo in Bygdøy allé. They had a couple of whiskies together. ". . . I was struck by his kindness. He had in fact just got back from the mountains, and so it was very lucky that I hadn't called before." (quoted in Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry by Gordon Bowker, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997, p. 126) Lowry continued his studies at the University of Cambridge, where he gained fame as a promising young writer. Lowry obtained a first-class degree in English. His poem about Grieg, 'For Nordahl Grieg Ship's Fireman,' appeared in Cambridge Poetry (1930), published by Hogarth Press.

Lowry's first novel Ultramarine (1933) drew material from his voyage to Yokohama on the S.S. Pyrrhus. It was accepted for publication in 1932, but after the original typescrift was stolen Lowry rewrote the work from the penultimate version. The hero, a lonely mess-boy named Dana Hilliot, has got a job on the freighter Oedipus Tyrannus bound for Bombay and Singapore. Desperately, he tries to win the acceptance of the rest of his shipmates, who treat him with contempt. At the end he establishes a kind of comradeship with the ship's chief, Andy, his great enemy.

It has been noted that there are textual  similarities between Ultramarine and Grieg's Skibet gaar videre (1924, The Ship Sails On), but as regards literary influence the most important work was Blue Voyage (1927) by Conrad Aiken. While in Oslo in 1931, Lowry may have seen Edvard Munch's most famous painting, The Shriek (1893; 1895 litograph), which he sketched in a drawing. This parodic piece was enclosed in a letter to Aiken.

Aiken, like Lowry, was a great lover of cats. In Aiken's semi-autobiographical novel Ushant: An Essay (1952) Lowry is the ever-humorous Hambo, who "almost unable, in his despair, to work, and in great pain, too, from his lumbago, began a series of alcoholic fugues from which they were often afraid he might never return." (Ushant: An Essay, London: W. H. Allen, 1963, p. 350) Lowry did not break up with his spiritual father, but wrote on November 28, 1951 in a letter to Seymour Lawrence, the editor and publisher of the literary magazine Wake: "Speaking of Aiken as a writer, from the time that, before I had ever heard of him, his work first slammed down on my raw psyche like the lightning slamming down on the slew outside at this moment, I have always thought that he was the truest and most direct descendant of our own great Elizabethans, having a supreme gift of dramatic and poetic language, a genius of the highest and most original order . . . " (Sursum corda!: The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry: Volume II: 1947-1957, edited with introductions and annotations by Sherrill E. Grace, Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1995, p. 468)

Lowry lived in London and then in Paris until 1935. With his mentor Aiken he travelled to Spain in 1933 and met there, in Granade at the Villa Carmona pension, the aspiring American writer Jan Gabrial. She recalled their first meeting vividly: "I barely noticed him, registering merely, and peripherally at that, two solid florind men at an adjoining table, one balding, an third man, smaller, nutlike; and a pallid "madonna whose dark hair, tightly pinned, lent her an aspect of enforced submissiveness." (Inside the Volcano: My Life with Malcolm Lowry by Jan Gabrial, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, p. 3) The balding man was Aiken, the nutlike was Edward Burra, the painter, and the florid figure was Lowry. They married in 1934 in Paris and moved the next year to the United States, and eventually settled in Cuernevaca. Lowry wrote and drank tequila. His personal life fell apart when Jan left him in 1937. Their turbulent marriage ended in divorce in 1939.

In May 1936 Lowry spent ten-to-fourteen days as "a voluntary patient" in the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He was treated for alcoholism. Swinging the Maelstrom reflected this period. The protagonist, a musician, is called Bill Plantagenet.

After writing the novel Lunar Caustic, publishded posthumously in 1958, Lowry went to Mexico, which became the settings of Under the Volcano. In Cuernavaca and the nearby volcanoes he found the perfect landscape for his novel. The snowy peak of Popocatepetl was for him a symbol of aspiration, and the deep woods in the surroundings formed the opposite, lower depths.

In Oaxaca Lowry was thrown into a jail - he was considered a Spanish spy. Once he forgot the first draft of his manuscript in a bar. By the time Lowry left Mexico, his first marriage was in ruins. Jan Gabrial recalled: "He would drink anything. I had thrown out the rubbing alcohol I'd used to massage his back, but he gulped the contents of a bottle he thought contained hair tonic but which Josefina had refilled with cooking oil". (Inside the Volcano: My Life with Malcolm Lowry, p. 144) Lowry's second wife, the novelist Margerie Bonner, Lowry met in Los Angeles. He moved in 1939 to Dollarton, British Columbia, where he built for himself and for his wife a squatters shack to live. While the couple was in Europe, the shack burned down.

After a short visit to Mexico in 1945, the Lowrys returned to Canada, where they stayed until 1954, then moving to England. During his last years Lowry planned a modern, "drunken Divine Comedy," a sequence of seven novels built around Under the Volcano, called "The Voyage That Never Ends". He had already written the "Purgatory" part, "Paradise" had been destroyed in the fire. Simultaneously Lowry worked on a number of manuscripts, unable to bring his plans to completion. His 500-page adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel Tender Is the Night, made in collaboration with his wife, was simply unfilmable. Ivan Moffat wrote the script for Henry King's 1962 screen adaptation, starring Jennifer Jones and Jason Robards, Jr.

A movie-loving writer, Lowry acknowledged the impact of film on novel-writing and his work. In 1951 he said of F. W. Murnau's Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise) which he had seen in 1928: "70 minutes of this wonderful movie—though it falls to pieces later, doubtless due to the exigencies of Hollywood—have influenced me almost as much as any book I ever read, even though I've never seen it since." (quoted in The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry's Fiction by Sherrill E. Grace, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1982, p. 56)

Under the Volcano was for a short time on a best-seller list in the United States, selling more than Kathleen Winsor's historical romance Forever Amber (1944). Early sales in Canada were discouraging. Lowry wrote in a letter on March 6, 1950, to Derek Pethick: ". . . the sales in Canada from the end of 1947-49 were precisely 2 copies. The Sun published only a few syndicated lines that called it a turgid novel of self-destrucrion, not for the discerning (or something) reader. . . . In England it failed but quite honorably; in France they have put it in a classic series, yet another published is giving it wider distribution, and weirder still, it is being serialized in the daily newspaper Combat. As to the Swedish, Norwegian and Danish translations, I understand they are out, but I have not seen them. Nor, I imagine, has any Swede, Norwegian or Dane." (Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Harvey Breit & Margerie Bonner, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1965, p. 201) The Swedish translation did not appear until 1970. In France the novel was a critical success and hailed immediately as a classic. Anthony Burgess said in 1984 that "By the end of the century Under the Volcano may be seen as one of its few authentic masterpieces." (Ninety-nine Novels: The Best in English Since 1939: A Personal Choice by Anhony Burgess, London: Allison & Busby, 1984, p. 38)

First efforts to adapt the book into a film failed in the United States. When Lowry's German publisher began to negotiate about a movie version, perhaps Peter Lorre playing the role of the Consul, the author offered his help in the script development. John Huston's sombre film version from 1984 was shot in and around Cuernevaca. Albert Finney played the Consul. Guy Gallo's screenplay eliminated the character of Jacques Laruelle, "the screenplay presents us with people we understand far less than in the novel, and consequently have far less reason to care about." (The Encyclopedia of Novels Into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, foreword by Robert Wise, New York: Checkmark Books, second edition 2005, p. 481)

By 1940 Lowry had written an early, unpublishable edition of Under the Volcano. He had sent it to his agent Harold Matson, but after twelve publishers had rejected the manuscript Matson returned it. The next five years he spent rewriting and deepening the magical and mythical elements, especially after meeting a Cabbalist, Charles Stansfield-Jones, spiritual son of Aleister Crowley. The novel went through innumerable revisions, many with Margerie Lowry's help, and was eventually published by Jonathan Cape ten years after the author started to work on it. Lowry used the term "churrigueresque" to describe the novel; this architertural term refers to a Spanish baroque style characterized by elaborate surface decoration.

"Somebody threw a dead dog after him down the ravine." (Ibid., p. 356) The story depicts the last twelve hours on November 2, 1938, in the life of Geoffrey Firmin, an ex-British Consul in Quauhnahuac, a city situated under two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl. Curiously, the first chapter is set on the Day of the Dead in 1939, a year after the death of the Consul. He is an alcoholic. "Oh, I know, but we got so horrible drunkness that night before, so perfectamente borracho, that it seems to me, the Consul is as sick as I am.' Dr Virgil shook his head. 'Sickness is not only in body, but in that part used to be call: soul. Poor your friend he spend his money on earth in such continuous tragedies.'" (Ibid., p. 5) The Consul has rejected the love of his wife and friends, and taken to drink as an escape from his personal demons and the inhumanity of the modern world. Other central characters are Jacques Laruelle, a failed filmmaker and adulterous lover, who looks back on the dramatic events of the fiesta Day of the Dead in Mexico, and Hugh, the consul's half-brother, an anti-Fascist journalist, much preoccupied by the Spanish Civil War. Like James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), set on a single day, June 16, 1904, in Dublin, the novel is partly written in stream of consciousness. Despite the Faustian theme, the events show the most dark humour. A tragic hero, the Consul has chosen damnation, he slowly kills himself with alcohol, but at the end he is somewhat casully murdered.

Malcolm Lowry
Late of the Bowery
His prose was flowery
And often glowery
He lived, nightly, and drank, daily,
And died playing the ukulele.
('Epitaph,' Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry, edited by Earle Birney with the assistance of Margerie Lowry, San Francisco, CA.: City Lights Books, 1962, p. 62)

Lowry's alcoholism and mental disorders shadowed much of his writing career and starting a new novel was for him very difficult. The last ten years of his life he spent in and out of hospitals. Accidents followed him everywhere, broken bones, dog bites, blood poisoning. Malcolm Lowry died of an overdose of sleeping tablets (he choked to death) in a boarding house in Ripe, Sussex, England, on June 27, 1957. He was buried in the graveyard of the village church. The collected edition of Lowry's poetry was published in 1992. His poems were highly autobiographical and record his personal problems, probing such themes as desperation and guilt.

A number of Lowry's works has been published posthumously. In the unfinished novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid (1968) the protagonist, Sigbjørn Wilderness, is Lowry's alter ego – a writer unable to write, but whose voyage of self-destruction ends against all odds with a possible happy ending. Jung, who was interested in Under the Volcano and invited Lowry to come to Switzerland for treatment, refers to this transforming experience of midlife crisis as the "night sea journey". Lowry finished the "first of the first draft" in 1947, and resumed the work in Canada in 1951. He thought it as part of "The Voyage That Never Ends." According to the author, the protagonist was to be "man's unconscious."  None of Lowry's late ambitious projects were realized.

For further reading: The Kaleidoscopic Vision of Malcolm Lowry : Souls and Shamans by Nigel H. Foxcroft (2019); 'Foreword' by Vic Doyen and Patrick A. McCarthy, in The 1940 Under the Volcano: A Critical Edition, edited and with an introduction by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen (2015); Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, edited by Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey (2010); Malcolm Lowry's Volcano: Myth, Symbol, Meaning by David Markson and Sven Birkerts (2009); Malcolm Lowry: The Man and His Work by George Woodcock (2007); Inside the Volcano: My Life With Malcolm Lowry by Jan Gabrial (2000); A Darkness That Murmured: Essays on Malcolm Lowry and the Twentieth Century, ed. by Frederick Asals & Paul Tiessen (2000); The Making of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano by Frederick Asals (1997); Forest of Symbols: World, Text and Self in Malcolm Lowry's Fiction by Patrick McCarthy (1994); Pursued by Furies: A Life of Malcolm Lowry by Gordon Bowker (1993); Malcolm Lowry: Vancouver Days by Sheryl Salloum (1987); The Voyage That Never Ends: Malcolm Lowry's Fiction by Sherrill E. Grace (1982); Malcolm Lowry: A Biography by Douglas Day (1973); Lowry by Tony Kilgallin (1973); Lowry: The Man and His Work by George Woodcock (1971)

Selected works:

• Ultramarine: A Novel, 1933
• In Ballast to the White Sea, 1936
• Under the Volcano, 1947
  - Tulivuoren juurella (suom. Juhani Jaskari, 1968)
  - film: Under the Volcano, 1984, dir. by John Huston, screenplay by Guy Gallo, starring Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, Anthony Andrews, Ignacio López Tarso, Katy Jurado
  
• Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place, 1961
• Selected Poems, 1962 (edited by Earle Birney with the assistance of Margerie Lowry)
  
• Selected Letters, 1965 (edited by Harvey Breit & Margerie Bonner Lowry)
• Lunar Caustic, 1968 (edited by Earle Birney and Margerie Lowry, with a foreword by Conrad Knickerbocker)
• Dark as the Grave Wherein my Friend is Laid, 1968 (unfinished; edited by Douglas Day & Margerie Lowry)
• October Ferry to Gabriola, 1970 (edited by Margerie Lowry)
• Malcolm Lowry: Psalms and Songs, 1975 (edited by Margerie Lowry)
• The Letters of Malcolm Lowry and Gerald Noxon, 1940-1952, 1988 (edited by Paul Tiessen)
• The Cinema of Malcolm Lowry: A Scholarly Edition of Lowry's Tender is the Night, 1990 (edited with an introduction by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen)
• The Letters of Conrad Aiken and Malcolm Lowry, 1929-1954, 1992 (edited by Cynthia Sugars)
• The Collected Poetry of Malcolm Lowry, 1992 (edited and introduced by Kathleen Scherf; with explanatory annotation by Chris Ackerley)
  
• Sursum Corda!: The Collected Letters of Malcolm Lowry, 1995-97 (2 vols., edited with introduction and annotations Sherrill Grace)
  
• Malcolm Lowry's La Mordida: A Scholarly Edition, 1996 (edited by Patrick A. McCarthy)
• The Voyage That Never Ends: Fictions, Poems, Fragments, Letters, 2007 (edited by Michael Hofmann)
• Malcolm Lowry: From the Mersey to the World, 2009 ( edited by Bryan Biggs and Helen Tookey)
  
• Swinging the Maelstrom, 2013 (edited by Vik Doyen; introduction by Vik Doyen & Miguel Mota; explanatory notes by Chris Ackerley; foreword by Patrick A. McCarthy & Paul Tiessen)
• The 1940 Under the Volcano: A Critical Edition, 2015 (edited by Miguel Mota and Paul Tiessen, annotations by Chris Ackerley & David Large, foreword by Vic Doyen & Patrick McCarthy, afterword by Frederick Asals
• Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry, 2017 (edited by Earle Birney with the assistance of Margerie Lowry, preface by Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
• Malcolm Lowry's La Mordida: A Scholarly Edition, 2023 (edited by Patrick A. McCarthy)