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. Given the struggle to write the book, and perhaps sensing that he would never manage another such, Lowry wanted to be there on publication day ... FULL STORY »
