He spent little time at the university,[3] however, and his penchant for drink was already apparent; Hugh Sykes Davies, one of Lowry's academic supervisors and later a friend, found that the only place in which it was possible to teach him was in a pub.

[3] Lowry was already well travelled; besides his sailing experience, between terms he made visits to America, to befriend his literary idol, Conrad Aiken,[7] and to Norway and Germany.

After Cambridge, Lowry lived briefly in London, existing on the fringes of the vibrant Thirties literary scene and meeting Dylan Thomas.

[citation needed] After an estrangement, Lowry followed Jan to New York City where, almost incoherent after an alcohol-induced breakdown, he checked into Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in 1936 – experiences which later became the basis of his novella Lunar Caustic.

[3] Lowry and Jan moved to Mexico, arriving in the city of Cuernavaca on 2 November 1936, the Day of the Dead, in a final attempt to salvage their marriage.

His family put him up at the Hotel Normandie in Los Angeles where he continued working on his novel and met his second wife, the actress and writer Margerie Bonner.

The couple traveled to Europe, America and the Caribbean, and while Lowry continued to drink heavily, this seems to have been a relatively peaceful and productive period.

He won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction in 1961 for his posthumous collection Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place.

[10] Lowry died in June 1957, in a rented cottage in the village of Ripe, Sussex, where he was living with wife Margerie after having returned to England in 1955,[11] ill and impoverished.

Scholarly editions of Lowry's final work in progress, La Mordida ("The Bribe"), and his screen adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night have also been published.

Volcano: An Inquiry into the Life and Death of Malcolm Lowry (1976) is an Oscar-nominated National Film Board of Canada documentary directed by Donald Brittain and John Kramer.

Selections from Lowry's novel are read by Richard Burton amid images shot in Mexico, the United States, Canada and England.

[20] According to Professor Dean Irvine at Dalhousie University, Lowry had given an early copy of the novel to Gabrial's mother before the couple went to Mexico in 1936.

[8] Lowry envisioned The Voyage That Never Ends as his magnum opus: an epic cycle encompassing his existing novels and stories as well as projected works, with Under the Volcano as its centrepiece.

An early typescript has the sequence's contents listed as: – – – – Lowry labelled Under the Volcano as "The Centre" while marking Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid, Eridanus, and La Mordida as "Trilogy".

As ever Malc turned these experiences into literature which he initially entitled the 'Atomic Rhythm' which eventually became The Ordeal of Sigbjørn Wilderness, which was never developed beyond a rough sketch and remains unpublished.

[27] The posthumous publications of his unfinished manuscripts have brought several more parts of The Voyage That Never Ends to light, though these vary in completeness and Lowry's final intentions with these works can only be speculated on.

The published version of Lunar Caustic, for instance, was compiled by his widow Margerie Lowry and poet Earle Birney from "two distinctly different manuscripts.

Lowry planned to use this basic narrative pattern as the springboard for innumerable questions about such concerns as art, identity, the nature of existence, political issues, and alcoholism.

"[30] Because so much of The Voyage That Never Ends was left incomplete (much of it hardly begun, barely going beyond his initial conceptual framework) what exists only hints at the final form Lowry intended for his magnum opus.