- This article is about the writer Graham Greene. For the Canadian actor, see Graham Greene (actor).
Graham Greene (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) was a prolific English novelist.
Life and work
He was born Henry Graham Greene in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, where his father was headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which he attended. He went on to Balliol College, Oxford, and his first work (a volume of poetry) was published in 1925, while he was an undergraduate. In his autobiography, he gives many details of his difficult childhood. After graduation, he took up a career in journalism. He became a Catholic in 1926, due to his love story with the Catholic convert Vivien Daryell-Browning, whom he married in 1927. Amongst other things, he was a film critic, until he caused the shutdown of the magazine for which he worked by getting it involved in a libel action as a result of a comment he made about Shirley Temple.
His novels are written in a contemporary realistic style, often featuring characters troubled by self-doubt and living in seedy or rootless circumstances. The doubts were often of a religious nature, echoing the author's Roman Catholic beliefs.
Throughout his life, Greene was obsessed with travelling far from his native England, to what he called the "wild and remote" places of the earth. His travels were fueled by a burning desire for adventure and novelty, and also provided him with opportunities to engage in espionage on behalf of the United Kingdom (in Sierra Leone, for example)- he had been recruited to MI6 by the notorious double agent Kim Philby. He reworked the colorful and exciting characters and places he encountered into the fabric of his novels.
Greene's books were originally divided into thrillers, mystery/suspense books that he himself cast as "entertainments" but which often included a notable philosophical edge, and the high literary books such as The Power and the Glory, on which his reputation was thought to be based. As his career lengthened, however, Greene and his readers both found the "entertainments" to be of nearly as high a value as the literary efforts, and Greene's later efforts such as The Human Factor , The Comedians , Our Man in Havana and The Quiet American combine these modes into works of remarkable insight and compression.
In the last years of his life, Greene lived in the small resort city of Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. On his passing in 1991, he was interred in the nearby cemetery in Corsier-sur-Vevey.
October 2004 saw the publication of the third and final volume of The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry, Greene's official biographer. The writing of this biography created a story in itself in that Sherry followed in Greene's footsteps, even coming down with diseases that Greene had come down with in the same place. Sherry's work reveals that Greene, a sometime spy in his younger days, continued to submit reports to British intelligence until the end of his life. This has led scholars and Greene's reading public to entertain the provocative question, "Was Greene a novelist who was also a spy, or was his lifelong literary career the perfect cover?"
Bibliography
Verse
Novels
Autobiography
- A Sort of Life 1971 (autobiography)
- Ways of Escape 1980 (autobiography)
- A World of My Own 1992 (dream diary, posthumously published)
Travel books
Plays
Short stories
Other
- Introduction to My Silent War, by Kim Philby, 1968, British Intelligence traitor, mole for Soviets
Further reading
Mortmain, 1974
External links
