Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957) was a British novelist and poet whose masterpiece Under the Volcano is widely hailed as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Born near Liverpool, England, Lowry grew up in a prominent, wealthy family and chafed under the expectations placed upon him by parents and boarding school. He wrote passionately on the themes of exile and despair, and his own wanderlust and erratic lifestyle made him an icon to later generations of writers.

Malcolm Lowry, who would permanently stake his claim to literary immortality with the masterpiece Under the Volcano, wrote Ultramarine, his debut, as an undergraduate at Cambridge. Displaying the linguistic virtuosity and haunting imagery that became signatures of Lowry's mature style, Ultramarine, a novel he continually rewrote and revised from publication until his death, is one of his central works, and this new edition offers the opportunity for a fuller assessment of his place in the modern canon.Ultramarine is the story of Dana Hilliot's first voyage, as mess-boy on the freighter Oedipus Tyrannus bound for Bombay and Singapore: of his struggle to win the approval of his shipmates, trying to match their example in the bars and bordellos of the Chinese ports while at the same time remaining faithful to his first love, Janet, back home in England. Alternating between Dana's own narrative and the ribald humor and colorful language of the seamen's conversation, Ultramarine depicts a boy's initiation into the company of men.