A prolific British author, Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990) wrote several large-scale, multi-volume series of novels as well as poetry, plays, short stories, and travel books. People and places of the Mediterranean were a central theme of his work. Lawrence...

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 literat...

Until 1957 Lawrence Durrell was an ordinary disaffected Englishman with a passion for writing, seemingly destined to live his life in a series of remote Mediterranean isles in the shadow of his renowned brother Gerald. In that year, however, he achieved...

PARIS - Lawrence Durrell, the British novelist who conveyed his love for Mediterranean life in "The Alexandria Quartet" and other lyrical works, died at his home in southern France, his family said yesterday. He was 78. The cause of Mr. Durrell's death Wednesday...

Lawrence Durrell, 78, the British novelist and poet who was best known as author of "The Alexandria Quartet" and "Bitter Lemons," died Nov. 7 at his home in Sommieres, the village in southern France where he had lived for 33 years. He had emphysema....

[In The Alexandria Quartet Durrell paints a] fevered city, a dying city, a prodigal, stranger-loving, leaf-veined city. A city of deep resignation, of spiritual lassitude and self-indulgence, of jealousy and retribution…. How do all these divergent images add up? They are dramatic, erotic, anything but peaceful; they cannot be easily summarized, for Alexandria is like the recurring palms that appear in the mirrored walls of the ballroom at the Cecil, fractured and prismatic. She is to be discovered. ...

When Darley settles down with Clea to live happily ever after, the reader is more likely to sigh in disappointment than in satisfaction: we had thought there was more to [the Alexandria Quartet] than that, and indeed there was. The last volumes escape all too successfully from the baffling relativity which was the chief interest of the first two. A mechanical but genuine source of power in the early books was multiple points of view. Quite apart from tacit transitions from one narrative eye to another, even...

Is "The Alexandria Quartet" as good as we all thought it was when we first read it more than 20 years ago? I wondered about this when I saw that Lawrence Durrell has a new novel, "Constance," coming out. Since nothing he published after the "Quartet" seemed to be in the same class, it occurred to me that we may have overestimated the books for which he is famous. So I went back to the "Quartet"—like novelists, we have to keep revising ourselves&...