British · 1909–1957
Malcolm Lowry drank himself to death at forty-seven, but he left behind "Under the Volcano" (1947), one of the century's great novels. Set during the Day of the Dead in a Mexican town beneath two volcanoes, it follows an alcoholic British consul through his final twelve hours. Lowry worked on the book for a decade, layering symbols and allusions until the prose became hallucinatory. The novel was largely ignored on publication; it has never gone out of print. Lowry's life was a wreck of unfinished projects and lost manuscripts, but the one masterpiece was enough.