‘Brother Albert’: Albert Erskine, Malcolm Lowry, and the Editing of <i>Under the Volcano</i>

Abstract In this essay, I draw on a range of archival sources to examine the working relationship between the modernist author Malcolm Lowry and the literary editor Albert Erskine. I examine Erskine’s editing of Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) at the firm Reynal and Hitchcock and unpack Erskine’s input into the final shape of the novel. Erskine worked with Lowry extensively on the manuscript of Under the Volcano in 1946 and 1947 and oversaw several significant changes to the text. In this essay, I examine Erskine’s approach to literary editing, exploring its origins in the New Criticism of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, and Erskine’s negotiations between the practicalities and demands of commercial postwar publishing and Lowry’s exacting and experimental approach to his work. In doing so, I explore firstly how Erskine’s literary editing was shaped by his training in a particularly American form of New Criticism and, secondly, how these editorial principles were carried out and shaped the final form of Under the Volcano.