Lawrence Durrell; Author of ‘Alexandria Quartet’

Lawrence Durrell, the India-born British novelist best known for his “Alexandria Quartet,” has died at his home in Southern France. He was 78.

Durrell died Wednesday in the village of Sommieres, where he had lived for more than 30 years, his family announced Thursday. The family gave no cause of death, but Durrell had acknowledged in recent years that he suffered from emphysema.

Born of British parents in India on Feb. 27, 1912, Durrell grew up in Darjeeling and lived internationally, drawing on his travels as inspiration for his books and poetry.

Leaving India when he was 18, Durrell studied at Canterbury, settled briefly in London, then moved to the Greek island of Corfu. As a Foreign Service press officer, he lived in Athens and Cairo, and then spent the World War II years in Alexandria, Egypt. He later lived in Argentina, Yugoslavia and Cyprus before moving permanently to France.

Based on his experience in Alexandria, Durrell wrote his famous quartet in France between 1957 and 1960. The four novels, which have been translated into 20 languages, are titled “Justine,” “Balthazar,” “Mountolive” and “Clea.”

Durrell himself described the quartet, based on a theme of love as self-discovery, as “a continuum of words” and “a relativity poem.”

In 1974, Durrell spent a semester as Andrew W. Ellon visiting professor of English at Caltech--primarily to be close to his good friend, American novelist Henry Miller, who died in 1980.

The two men exchanged letters for more than 40 years, providing mutual inspiration, encouragement and admiration. The letters were published in two volumes in 1963 and 1988.

Miller had praised his friend as the master of the English language.

Once asked by The Times how the two passed their time together, Miller said they engaged in such amusements as turning the color television set entirely green, tuning in professional wrestling and laughing their heads off.

During his tenure at Caltech, Durrell lived in the faculty club, known as the Athenaeum, in a room once occupied by Albert Einstein.

“I feel like I’ve been secreted away to some strange Pasadena monastery created for the retirement of Rudolph Valentino,” he observed.

The well-traveled writer enjoyed exploring Southern California.

“I actually went to Forest Lawn to mock,” he told The Times, “and came away humbled. Despite the fairground atmosphere, the beauty of the landscape was touching. The statuary was awful, but public statuary everywhere is awful.

“No one could criticize Forest Lawn,” he added, “who has seen Lourdes, which is the most awful demonstration of religious vulgarity I can think of.”

He saw nothing unusual about the engagement of a wordsmith by a major center of science education and research.

“I’m very excited to teach literature at a great center of technology like this,” he said, “because rather than a vast separation between two cultures, I see science as a force that has greatly altered poetry, literature and our whole understanding of humanism. At nearly the same time, the atom was split and the ego was split--our age takes off from that point.”

Durrell was married three times and had two daughters, one of whom has died. He is survived by his daughter, Penelope Berengaria.