A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: English novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist, whose novels treat moral issues in the context of political setitbusngs. Greene is one of the most widely read novelist of the 20th-century, a superb storyteller. Adventure and suspense are constant elements in his novels and many of his books have been made into successful films. Greene was a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature several times, but he never received the award. Graham Greene was born born on October 2, 1904 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, to Charles Henry and Marion Raymond Greene, the fourth of six children. His father had a poor academic record but became the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, following Dr. Thomas Fry. Greene was educated at Berkhamstead School and Balliol College, Oxford. Graham's brothers included Hugh, who went on to become a Director General of the BBC, and Raymond, an accomplished mountaineer involved in the 1931 Kamet and 1933 Everest expeditions. One of Marion's distant cousins happened to be a person called R. L. Stevenson. He wrote quite regularly in Student Magazines, and was an editor of The Oxford Outlook. His first work, a collection of apparently forgettable poems, Babbling April, was published during his last year at Oxford. It was followed by two novels in the style of Joseph Conrad. After graduation, he worked briefly for the Notitbusngham Journal. He was baptized a Catholic in February 1926. In March, he returned to London, as the Sub Editor for The Times. Greene married Vivienne ( later Vivien ) Dayrell-Browning in October 1927. Vivien Greene gave birth to a daughter in December 1933, six months after they had moved again, this time to Oxford. His first novel, The Man Within, came out in 1929, to public and critical acclaim. A lucrative contract with Heinemann followed, for his next three novels, enabling him to resign from The Times, and devote more time to his novels. The Name of Action and Rumour at night fall, his next two books, did not do very well. The Greenes moved to the Cotswolds in 1931, and he had begun work on what was to establish him as a significant literary figure. Stamboul Train ( also known as Orient Express ) went on to become a commercial success, and a film ( by Twentieth Century Fox ). Greene received numerous honours from around the world, and published two volumes of autobiography, A sort of life (1971), Ways of escape (1980), and the story of his friendship with Panamanian dictator General Omar Torrijos. As a writer Greene was very prolific and versatile. He wrote five dramas and screenplays for several films based on his novels. In the 1930s and early 1940s he wrote over five hundred reviews of books, films, and plays, mainly for The Spectator. His film criticism career actually stretched back to his Oxford days, with an “Outlook" article in 1925. He also had written a few essays on films for The Times. It's a Battlefield was published in early 1934. Greene started travell -ing extensively in 1934 - brief trips to Germany, Latvia and Estonia preceding an arduous journey overland through Liberia, in the company of his cousin Barbara, which was chronicled in Journey without Maps. He returned in April 1937; England made Me, written before he had left, was published soon after. A Gun for Sale came next, in 1936. Francis Greene was born in September 1936. Greene's religious convictions did not become overtly apparent in his fiction unti Brighton Rock (1938), which depicted a teenage gangster Pinkie with a kind of demonic spirituality. In the same year, Greene made a trip to Mexico, to investigate into alleged atrocities against the Catholics. The result of the journey was two books, The Lawless Roads in March 1939, and The Power And The Glory, perhaps his finest book, in September 1939. The latter won for him his first major literary prize, The Hawthornden. The Confidential Agent (1939) included a strange piece of Anti-Semitic characterization, in which the mysterious Forbes/Furstein, a rich Jew, plans to destroy traditional English culture from within. However, in 1981 the author was invited to Israel and awarded the Jerusalem Prize. Religious themes were explicit in the The Power And The Glory, The Heart of the Matter (1948), a story of a man trapped between the emotional demands of two women, which Greene characterized as "a success in the great vulgar sense of that term," and The End of the Affair (1951), which established Greene's international reputation. This novel was partly based on Greene's affair with Catherine Walston, whom he had met in 1946. She was married to one of the richest men in England, Henry Walston, a prominent supporter of the Labour Party. Catherine was the mother of five children. Greene's relationship with her continued over ten years and produced a book, After Two Years (1949), which was printed 25 copies. Most of the copies were later destroyed. During World War II Greene worked "in a silly useless job" as he later said in an intelligence capacity for the Foreign Office in London, directly under Kim Philby, a future defector to the Soviet Union. One mission took Greene to West Africa, but he did not find much excitement in his remote posting - "This is not a government house, and there is no larder: there is also a plague of house-flies which come from the African bush lavatories round the house," he wrote to London. Greene returned to England in 1942. His old friend, Philby, Greene met again in the late 1980s in Moscow. After the war he travelled widely as a free-lance journalist, and lived long periods in Nice, on the French Riviera. With his anti-American comments, Greene gained access to such Communist leaders as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh, but the English writer Evelyn Waugh, who knew Greene well, assured in a letter to his friend that the author 'is a secret agent on our side and all his buttering up of the Russians is "cover". Greene left the Service in May 1944, and joined the Political Warfare Executive, editing a literary magazine intended for France. After the War, Greene was commissioned to write a film treatment based on Vienna, a city occupied by the Four Powers at the time. He collaborated with Carol Reed in writing The Third Man, a skillful tale of deception and drug trafficking. The film went on to win the First Prize at Cannes in 1949. In the 1950s Greene's emphasis switched from religion to politics. He lived at the Majestic hotel in Saigon and made trips to Hong Kong and Singapore. In 1953 he was in Kenya, reporting the Mau Mau upraising, and in 1956 he spent a few weeks in Stalinist Poland, and tried to help a musician to escape to the West. The Asian setitbusng stimulated Greene's The Quiet American (1955), which was about American involvement in Indochina. The story focuses on the murder of Alden Pyle (the American of the title). The narrator, Thomas Fowler, a tough-minded, opium-smoking journalist, arranges to have Pyle killed by the local rebels. Pyle has stolen Fowler's girl friend, Phuong, and he is connected to a terrorist act, a bomb explosion in a local café. The Quiet American was considered sympathetic to Communism in the Soviet Union and a play version of the novel was produced in Moscow. Our Man in Havanna (1958) was born after a journey to Cuba, but Greene had the story sketched already much earlier. On one trip he asked a taxi driver to buy him a little cocaine and got boracic powder. The novel was made into a film in 1959, directed by Carol Reed. During the filming Greene met Ernest Hemingway, and was invited to his house for drinks. The Comedians (1966) depicted Papa Doc Duvalier's repressive rule in Haiti, and The Honorary Consul (1973) was a hostage drama set in Paraguay. The Human Factor (1978) stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for six months. In the story an agent falls in love with a black woman during an assignment in South Africa. Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland, on April 3, 1991. Two days before his death Greene signed a note that authorised Norman Sherry to complete an authorised biography. The first part of the book had appeared in 1989 under the title: The Life of Graham Greene. |
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