Lowry, (Clarence) Malcolm (Boden) (1909–1957)

English novelist. Mexico is the setting for his inventive masterpiece Under the Volcano 1947, on the last day in the life of an alcoholic British consul.

After a rebellious youth and a voyage to China as a deck hand (which resulted in Ultramarine 1933, his first novel), he became an itinerant alcoholic who periodically wrote. He was deported from Mexico and lived mainly in Canada until in 1954 returning to the UK, where he committed suicide. The posthumous publication of much of his unfinished work (for example, Lunar Caustic 1968) was not entirely successful.