Malcolm Lowry (1909-57), English novelist, short-story writer, and poet, born in Birkenhead. He is famous for his quasi-autobiographical novel Under the Volcano (1947). Written in the 1930s, the work recounts, through a grotesque and nightmarish vision, the physical and spiritual breakdown of an English consul in Mexico. Lowry lived for a time in Hollywood, California, working on film scripts, and the narrative technique of the novel is indebted to the art of film. In 1984 it was made into a motion picture directed by John Huston.