Word: volcanoe
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After a professional visit to Alabama in April 1960, veteran New York Times Reporter Harrison Salisbury reported that the city of Birmingham was a smoldering volcano of racial tension, "a community of fear." These and other Salisbury conclusions, published in a two-part series, outraged six Birmingham and neighboring Bessemer city commissioners (plus one police detective), who separately brought libel suits against Salisbury and the Times and asked a total of $3,100,000 in damages. Last week in New Orleans, by holding that a newspaper published in New York City could not be sued for libel in Alabama...
...from notes fished out of a Cambridge roommate's wastebasket. After graduating with honors in English, he drifted to Hollywood, New York and Cuernavaca, and from country to country, was married to and divorced from an "actress-secretary," and began the nine-year ordeal of getting Under the Volcano on paper...
...with coal-oil lamps, driftwood fuel and an outdoor privy. Lowry, a barrel-chested man with piercing blue eyes, drank, swam, drank, sang bawdy Spanish ditties to his own ukulele accompaniment, and drank. When the cottage caught fire, he was badly burned rescuing the entire manuscript of Under the Volcano, which came to be the one and only literary success of Lowry's life. At his death he was drafting a massive cycle of novels to be aptly titled The Voyage That Never Ends...
...late Malcolm Lowry was the Dylan Thomas of modern fiction. Like Thomas, he was a hypnotic user and abuser of language. Like Thomas, the author of Under the Volcano erupted in lava flows of talk and lapsed into broody silences. Like Thomas, Lowry was a compulsively heavy drinker. At 47, he died an alcoholic's dreadful death: lying on his back in a drunken stupor, he began to vomit and choked to death. Finally, like Thomas, he spawned the kind of cult that makes a writer seem worth more dead than alive...
...Lowry cultists have had only one big book to stand on. In Under the Volcano, Author Lowry compressed fiery emotional thrust within a Joycean time scheme to record the one-day odyssey of a dipsomaniacal British ex-consul living in Mexico. The hero is at war with his half brother, his estranged wife, himself and, perhaps most pertinently, with modern civilization. The theme is what Lowry himself has dubbed "the migraine of alienation." Lush as a tropical jungle, the book alternates between fierce introspection and a hallucinatory evocation of the Mexican scene. When it was published in 1947, it received...