Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) is best known for his one and only masterpiece, an autobiographical novel entitled Under the Volcano. It weaves together themes of alienation, love, political idealism, and myth. An uncontrolled alcoholic, Lowry's life was marked by self-destruction and desolation.

Lowry was born on July 28, 1909, in New Brighton, near Liverpool, England, the fourth son of Arthur Osborne Lowry and Evelyn Boden Lowry. His father was a wealthy Liverpool cotton broker who provided Lowry with a conventional English upper-class childhood. He was sent away to boarding school when he was eight years old and later briefly attended a public school where he wrote poems and stories for the Leys Fortnightly, the school magazine.

Later in his life, Lowry would lament frequently about his abysmal childhood. Most biographers attribute this to Lowry's tendency to embellish and fictionalize events to serve his own purposes. For example, he claimed that the...