THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT ALSO TO LOOK AT KIP FENN, A MAJOR NOVEL ABOUT THE 21st CENTURY
- freely available on this site
Durrell, Lawrence ___ 1912-1990 ___
British (born in India) ___ writer
BIOGRAPHICAL SUMMARY
Lawrence Durrell was born in Darjeeling,
India, the son of Lawrence Samuel Durrell, a British civil engineer, and
Louisa, an Irish protestant, both of whom had been brought up in India.
In 1923, he was sent to be educated in England, and attended various schools
without much success. In the 1930s, he moved to Paris where he met Henry
Miller and Anäis Nin, among others, who encouraged his writing. In
subsequent years, he spent some time with his mother on Corfu, published
his first novel 'The Black Book', and edited a literary magazine. In the
war, Durrell served as press attache to the British embassies in Cairo and
Alexandria, and, after the war, held various diplomatic and teaching posts
mostly in Greece, but also in Belgrade and Buenos Aires. From 1953, he lived
in Cyprus, working again, for a while, for the British Government during
the Cypriot revolution. He is most famous for the 'Alexandria Quartet',
four novels written in the 1950s. During the latter part of his life, Durrell
lived in the South of France, which is the setting for his most ambitious
work, 'The Avignon Quintet'. Apart from novels, Durrell also wrote several
celebrated books about the Greek Islands (one of which - Prospero's Cell
- is a diary) and poetry. Durrell married four times. He had two daughters
each with his first two wives, Nancy Meyers and Yvette Cohen. His second
daughter, Sappho, committed suicide in 1985, leaving behind unsubstantiated
accusations about her father.
One
biography link
DIARY DATES, CONTENT DESCRIPTORS
1937-1938 ___ literary travel Greece
WEB TEXT LINKS
ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT LINKS
Southern
Illinois University ___ Prospero's
Cell
British
Library, Manuscript Collections, Special Durrell library
SOME PUBLISHED TITLES
Prospero's Cell
May 2005
THIS IS THE DIARY JUNCTION - DATA AND LINKS FOR OVER 500 HISTORICAL AND LITERARY DIARISTS
Please
email if you have any corrections, additions or comments. |
IMPORTANT NOTES AND CAUTIONS:
1) The first line of basic information
may be incomplete in several ways: some historical figures have different
names (titles, pen-names); their birth and death dates may be unknown or
uncertain (g - guess, c - circa); similarly, their occupations may be unknown,
or they may have had other jobs; and, for early diarists, I've used 'British'
a bit too freely. 2) The biographical summary may not be accurate. It was
compiled quickly from various sources, mostly on the internet, and the facts
were not checked anywhere near as rigorously as they would have been if
they'd been intended for publication in a printed form. 3) The journal dates
and descriptors (which are in no particular order) must be treated with
caution: since I have not examined the diaries myself, the descriptors are
only guesses based on bibliographies, anthologies and internet biographies.
4) For the biography and etext links, I have ignored any sites with charges,
and I have avoided, wherever possible, those with pop-ups or too much advertising.
I have limited myself to providing three etext links where there is some
variety between them. 5) For the original manuscript links, I have limited
myself to providing a maximum of two (although, for a few diarists, their
original diaries are held in more than two places). 6) I have provided the
titles - chosen randomly - for up to three printed editions of the diaries. |