Graham Greene
in full Henry Graham Greene
born Oct. 2, 1904, Berkhamsted,
Hertfordshire, Eng.
died April 3, 1991, Vevey, Switz.
English novelist, short-story writer,
playwright, and journalist whose novels
treat life’s moral ambiguities in the
context of contemporary political settings.
His father was the headmaster of
Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended
for some years. After running away from
school, he was sent to London to a
psychoanalyst in whose house he lived while
under treatment. After studying at Balliol
College, Oxford, Greene converted to Roman
Catholicism in 1926, partly through the
influence of his future wife, Vivien
Dayrell-Browning, whom he married in 1927.
He moved to London and worked for The Times
as a copy editor from 1926 to 1930. His
first published work was a book of verse,
Babbling April (1925), and upon the modest
success of his first novel, The Man Within
(1929), he quit The Times and worked as a
film critic and literary editor for The
Spectator until 1940. He then traveled
widely for much of the next three decades as
a freelance journalist, searching out
locations for his novels in the process.
Greene’s first three novels are held to
be of small account. He began to come into
his own with a thriller, Stamboul Train
(1932; also entitled Orient Express), which
plays off various characters against each
other as they ride a train from the English
Channel to Istanbul. This was the first of a
string of novels that he termed
“entertainments,” works similar to thrillers
in their spare, tough language and their
suspenseful, swiftly moving plots, but
possessing greater moral complexity and
depth. Stamboul Train was also the first of
Greene’s many novels to be filmed (1934). It
was followed by three more entertainments
that were equally popular with the reading
public: A Gun for Sale (1936; also entitled
This Gun For Hire; filmed 1942), The
Confidential Agent (1939; filmed 1945), and
The Ministry of Fear (1943; filmed 1945). A
fifth entertainment, The Third Man, which
was published in novel form in 1949, was
originally a screenplay for a classic film
directed by Carol Reed.
One of Greene’s finest novels, Brighton
Rock (1938; filmed 1948), shares some
elements with his entertainments—the
protagonist is a hunted criminal roaming the
underworld of an English sea resort—but
explores the contrasting moral attitudes of
its main characters with a new degree of
intensity and emotional involvement. In this
book, Greene contrasts a cheerful and
warm-hearted humanist he obviously dislikes
with a corrupt and violent teenage criminal
whose tragic situation is intensified by a
Roman Catholic upbringing. Greene’s finest
novel, The Power and the Glory (1940; filmed
1962), has a more directly Catholic theme:
the desperate wanderings of a priest who is
hunted down in rural Mexico at a time when
the church is outlawed there. The weak and
alcoholic priest tries to fulfill his
priestly duties despite the constant threat
of death at the hands of a revolutionary
government.
Greene worked for the Foreign Office
during World War II and was stationed for a
while at Freetown, Sierra Leone, the scene
of another of his best-known novels, The
Heart of the Matter (1948; filmed 1953).
This book traces the decline of a
kind-hearted British colonial officer whose
pity for his wife and mistress eventually
leads him to commit suicide. The End of the
Affair (1951; filmed 1999) is narrated by an
agnostic in love with a woman who forsakes
him because of a religious conviction that
brings her near to sainthood.
Greene’s next four novels were each set
in a different Third World nation on the
brink of political upheaval. The protagonist
of A Burnt-Out Case (1961) is a Roman
Catholic architect tired of adulation who
meets a tragic end in the Belgian Congo
shortly before that colony reaches
independence. The Quiet American (1956;
filmed 1958 and 2002) chronicles the doings
of a well-intentioned American government
agent in Vietnam in the midst of the
anti-French uprising there in the early
1950s. Our Man in Havana (1958; filmed 1959)
is set in Cuba just before the communist
revolution there, while The Comedians (1966;
filmed 1967) is set in Haiti during the rule
of François Duvalier. Greene’s last four
novels, The Honorary Consul (1973; filmed
1983), The Human Factor (1978; filmed 1979),
Monsignor Quixote (1982), and The Tenth Man
(1985), represent a decline from the level
of his best fiction.
The world Greene’s characters inhabit is
a fallen one, and the tone of his works
emphasizes the presence of evil as a
palpable force. His novels display a
consistent preoccupation with sin and moral
failure acted out in seedy locales
characterized by danger, violence, and
physical decay. Greene’s chief concern is
the moral and spiritual struggles within
individuals, but the larger political and
social settings of his novels give such
conflicts an enhanced resonance. His early
novels depict a shabby Depression-stricken
Europe sliding toward fascism and war, while
many of his subsequent novels are set in
remote locales undergoing wars, revolutions,
or other political upheavals.
Despite the downbeat tone of much of his
subject matter, Greene was in fact one of
the most widely read British novelists of
the 20th century. His books’ unusual
popularity is due partly to his production
of thrillers featuring crime and intrigue
but more importantly to his superb gifts as
a storyteller, especially his masterful
selection of detail and his use of realistic
dialogue in a fast-paced narrative.
Throughout his career, Greene was fascinated
by film, and he often emulated cinematic
techniques in his writing. No other British
writer of this period was as aware as Greene
of the power and influence of cinema.
Greene published several collections of
short stories, among them Nineteen Stories
(1947; revised as Twenty-One Stories, 1954).
Among his plays are The Living Room
(performed 1952) and The Potting Shed
(1957). His Collected Essays appeared in
1969. A Sort of Life (1971) is a memoir to
1931, to which Ways of Escape (1980) is a
sequel. A collection of his film criticism
is available in Mornings in the Dark: The
Graham Greene Film Reader (1993). In 2007 a
selection of his letters was published as
Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. The
unfinished manuscript The Empty Chair, a
murder mystery that Greene began writing in
1926, was discovered in 2008; it was
serialized the following year.
