Malcolm Lowry's Volcano

On this day in 1947 Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was published. Lowry began the book where it is set, in the Cuernavaca region of Mexico in the late 30s, but it had been a full and difficult decade in the making -- a handful of rewrites, many handfuls of rejections, a nearly disastrous fire, a divorce, and mostly a desperate struggle with alcohol that would at one point drive him to drink olive oil in the mistaken belief it was hair tonic.

Lowry wrote some of Under The Volcano down the street from my home in Niagara on the Lake.