The 1940 Under the Volcano: A Critical Edition

Upon completion, The 1940 Under the Volcano was shown by Lowry’s agent, Harold (Hal) Matson, to thirteen publishers in New York and then withdrawn. By that time, Lowry was already working on the 1947 Under the Volcano for which he became internationally renowned. 

The 1940 Under the Volcano is a bridge between Lowry’s 1930s fiction (especially In Ballast to the White Sea) and the 1947 Under the Volcano itself. In 1994, it was transcribed for posthumous publication, with a sensitive introduction by Frederick Asals and was offered by MLR Editions Canada in a short print-run. Although Asals wrote eloquently about the position of The 1940 Under the Volcano in Lowry’s corpus, scholars have only recently begun to pay systematic attention to convergences and divergences between this earlier work and the 1947 version.