Selected Letters of Malcolm Lowry

Malcolm Lowry was a British novelist and poet whose masterpiece Under the Volcano is widely hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Born near Liverpool, England, Lowry grew up in a prominent, wealthy family and chafed under the expectations placed upon him by parents and boarding school. He wrote passionately on the themes of exile and despair, and his own wanderlust and erratic lifestyle made him an icon to later generations of writers. Lowry died in a rented cottage in the village of Ripe, Sussex, where he was living with wife Margerie after having returned to England in the summer of 1955, ill and impoverished. The coroner’s verdict was death by misadventure, and the causes of death given as inhalation of stomach contents, barbiturate poisoning, and excessive consumption of alcohol. It has been suggested that his death was a suicide. Inconsistencies in the accounts given by his wife at various times about what happened at the night of his death have also given rise to suspicions of murder. Lowry is buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in Ripe. Lowry reputedly wrote his own epitaph: Here lies Malcolm Lowry, late of the Bowery, whose prose was flowery, and often glowery. He lived nightly, and drank daily, and died playing the ukulele, but the epitaph does not appear on his gravestone