Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene (born 1904 in Berkhamsted, died 1991 in Vevey, Switzerland) was an English novelist, screenwriter and critic, and one of the most widely read British writers of the twentieth century. Over some sixty-seven years of writing he produced more than twenty-five novels, moving between serious novels with Catholic concerns and fast-paced thrillers that he called "entertainments". He matters because he examined the moral and political confusions of the modern world while winning both large readerships and critical respect.

He was born at Berkhamsted School, where his father was the headmaster. His childhood was unhappy. Bullied by classmates for being the headmaster's son, he fell into a deep depression, made several suicide attempts and, in 1921, underwent months of psychoanalysis in London. The melancholy he carried from those years returned again and again in his fiction. At Balliol College, Oxford, he read history and kept largely apart from student social life, a distance that Evelyn Waugh later remembered. His first book, a volume of poems called Babbling April, appeared in 1925 and was poorly received.

After graduating he worked as a journalist in Nottingham and then as a sub-editor at The Times. He converted to Catholicism in 1926, partly through a correspondence with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he married the following year. His first novel, The Man Within (1929), was well enough received to let him leave the newspaper and write full time. The two books that followed failed, and he later disowned them. His first real success came with Stamboul Train (1932). He also earned money from film and book criticism for The Spectator and co-edited the magazine Night and Day, which closed in 1937 after a libel action over his review of Wee Willie Winkie.

His early work fell into two streams: thrillers such as Brighton Rock, and more serious novels such as The Power and the Glory, in which faith and guilt weigh heavily on the characters. Over time the two streams merged. The Comedians, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor combine suspense with a close view of their protagonists' inner lives. He also wrote short stories, plays and four books for children, but he always regarded himself first and foremost as a novelist. He kept a steady routine, writing roughly five hundred words a day, as his friend Michael Korda recalled.

Travel shaped much of his writing. A trip to Liberia in 1935 produced Journey Without Maps. After a 1938 journey to Mexico he wrote The Lawless Roads, and the novel that established his reputation, The Power and the Glory, grew out of the same experience. During the Second World War he served in Sierra Leone for MI6, where his supervisor and friend was Kim Philby, later exposed as a Soviet agent. Haiti became the setting for The Comedians, and Africa provided material for A Burnt-Out Case.

His legacy lies in the English novel of the twentieth century. He showed that moral seriousness, political awareness and suspense could coexist, and many later writers learned from that example. He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times but never won it. Late in life he described himself as a "Catholic agnostic", a phrase that captures the moral ambiguity running through his books.