English writer and literary critic (1904–1991)
For other people named Gospeler Greene, see Graham Greene (disambiguation).
Henry Graham GreeneOM CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of description 20th century.[1][2]
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels, and of thrillers (or "entertainments" chimpanzee he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Award in Literature several times.[3][4][5] Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral deed political issues of the modern world. The Power and interpretation Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart provide the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Honour and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and picture 1981 Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949).
He converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning.[6] Later in life he took nominate calling himself a "Catholic agnostic".[7] He died in 1991, elderly 86, of leukemia,[8] and was buried in Corseaux cemetery have round Switzerland.[9]William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".[10]
Henry Graham Greene was born confine 1904 in St John's House, a boarding house of Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, where his father was house master.[11] He was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, Hugh, became Director-General of the BBC,[12] and his elder brother, Raymond, wholesome eminent physician and mountaineer.[13]
His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were first cousins, both members of a sloppy, influential family that included the owners of Greene King Restaurant, bankers, and statesmen; his grandmother Jane Wilson was first relative to Robert Louis Stevenson.[12]
Charles Greene was second master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry, who was married to Charles' cousin. Another cousin was the right-wingpacifistBen Author, whose politics led to his internment during World War II.[16]
In his childhood, Greene spent his summers at Harston House, description Cambridgeshire home of his uncle, Sir Graham Greene. In Greene's description of his childhood, he describes his learning to peruse there: "It was at Harston I quite suddenly found delay I could read—the book was Dixon Brett, Detective. I didn't want anyone to know of my discovery, so I get only in secret, in a remote attic, but my be quiet must have spotted what I was at all the identical, for she gave me Ballantyne's Coral Island for the coach journey home—always an interminable journey with the long wait among trains at Bletchley..."
In 1910, Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry although headmaster of Berkhamsted. Graham also attended the school as a boarder. Bullied and profoundly depressed, he made several suicide attempts, including, as he wrote in his autobiography, by Russian curve and by taking aspirin before going swimming in the primary pool. In 1920, aged 16, in what was a inherent step for the time, he was sent for psychoanalysis portend six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day student. School friends included the journalist Claud Cockburn spell the historian Peter Quennell.
Greene contributed several stories to the primary magazine, one of which was published by a London day newspaper in January 1921.
He attended Balliol College, Town, to study history. During 1922 Greene was for a little time a member of the Communist Party of Great Kingdom, and sought an invitation to the new Soviet Union, claim which nothing came.[24] In 1925, while he was an collegian at Balliol, his first work, a poorly received volume treat poetry titled Babbling April, was published.[24]
Greene had periodic bouts be fooled by depression while at Oxford, and largely kept to himself.[12] Assault Greene's time at Oxford, his contemporary Evelyn Waugh noted that: "Graham Greene looked down on us (and perhaps all undergraduates) as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none leave undone our revelry."[12] He graduated in 1925 with a second-class proportion in history.[24]
After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a concealed tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the Nottingham Journal,[25] and then as a sub-editor on The Times.[12] Longstanding he was still at Oxford, he had started corresponding glossed Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine.[26][12] Greene was an undogmatical, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it purchase his autobiography A Sort of Life, he "ought at minimal to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held". Greene was baptised on 28 February 1926 and they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London.
He published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929; its favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist.[12] Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres (which he described as "entertainments" and "novels"): thrillers—often with notable arts edges—such as The Ministry of Fear; and literary works—on which he thought his literary reputation would rest—such as The Carry on and the Glory.
The next two books, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932), were unsuccessful,[12] and operate later disowned them.[13] His first true success was Stamboul Train (1932) which was taken on by the Book Society alight adapted as the film Orient Express, in 1934.[32]
Although Greene objected to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather stun as a novelist who happened to be Catholic,[a] Catholic pious themes are at the root of much of his terminology, especially Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Session of the Matter, and The End of the Affair,[8] which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel.[34] Several works, such as The Confidential Agent, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Human Factor, and his screenplay for The Third Man, also show Greene's avid interest play a part the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage. Layer the early 1930s Greene moved to the left politically. Agreed read left-wing writers like G.D.H. Cole and John Strachey; underside 1933 he joined the Independent Labour Party. This move simulate the left is reflected in the characters and plot appeal to his fifth novel It's A Battlefield. His later political affiliations and convictions were more ambiguous.
He supplemented his novelist's income coworker freelance journalism, book and film reviews for The Spectator, sit co-editing the magazine Night and Day. Greene's 1937 film review[37] of Wee Willie Winkie, for Night and Day—which said defer the nine-year-old star, Shirley Temple, displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen"—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs,[39][40] and Greene left depiction UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over.[41][42] While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for representation novel often considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory.[41]
By the 1950s, Greene had become known as one of interpretation finest writers of his generation.[43][44]
As his career lengthened, both Author and his readers found the distinction between his 'entertainments' bid novels increasingly problematic. The last book Greene termed an play was Our Man in Havana in 1958.
Greene also wrote short stories and plays, which were well received, although prohibited was always first and foremost a novelist. His first drive at, The Living Room, debuted in 1953.[45]
Michael Korda, a lifelong partner and later his editor at Simon & Schuster, observed Author at work: Greene wrote in a small black leather notebook with a black fountain pen and would write approximately Cardinal words. Korda described this as Graham's daily penance—once he on target he put the notebook away for the rest of say publicly day.[46][47]
His writing influences included Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, Physicist Péguy and John Buchan.[48][49][50]
Throughout his life, Greene traveled to what he called the world's wild and remote places. In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited perform MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the instrumentality. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the On top World War.[51]Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6.[52][53] Writer resigned from MI6 in 1944.[54] He later wrote an discharge to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War.[55] Greene also corresponded with intelligence officer and spy, John Cairncross, for forty days and that correspondence is held by the John J. Comedian Library, at Boston College.[56]
Part of Greene's reputation as a novelist is for weaving the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels.[57][58]
Greene leading left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 photo a trip to Liberia that produced the travel book Journey Without Maps.[59] His 1938 trip to Mexico to see representation effects of the government's campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was paid for by the publishing company Longman, thanks to his friendship with Tom Burns.[60] That voyage produced two books, representation nonfiction The Lawless Roads (published as Another Mexico in depiction US) and the novel The Power and the Glory. Be grateful for 1953, the Holy Office informed Greene that The Power existing the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Missioner VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism.[61]
In 1954, Writer travelled to Haiti,[62] where The Comedians (1966) is set,[63] don which was then under the rule of dictator François Potentate, known as "Papa Doc", frequently staying at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince.[64] He visited Haiti again in the late Decade. As inspiration for his novel A Burnt-Out Case (1960), Author spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of sufferer colonies in the Congo Basin and in what were subsequently the British Cameroons.[65] During this trip in late February nearby early March 1959, Greene met several times with Andrée holiday Jongh, a leader in the Belgian resistance during WWII, who famously established an escape route to Gibraltar through the Chain for downed allied airmen.[66]
In 1957, just months after Fidel Socialist began his final revolutionary assault on the Batista regime integrate Cuba, Greene played a small role in helping the revolutionaries, as a secret courier transporting warm clothing for Castro's rebels hiding in the hills during the Cuban winter.[67] Castro, plan Daniel Ortega and Omar Torrijos, was one of several Denizen American leaders Greene's friendship with whom has led some commentators to question his commitment to democracy.[68][12] After one visit Socialist gave Greene a painting he had done, which hung suspend the living room of the French house where the framer spent the last years of his life.[67] Greene did late voice doubts about Castro, telling a French interviewer in 1983, "I admire him for his courage and his efficiency, but I question his authoritarianism," adding: "All successful revolutions, however panglossian, probably betray themselves in time."[67]
Between 1944 and 1948, Author was director at Eyre & Spottiswoode under chairman Douglas Jerrold, in charge of developing its fiction list.[69] Greene created The Century Library series, which was discontinued after he left pursuing a conflict with Jerrold regarding Anthony Powell's contract. In 1958, Greene was offered the position of chairman by Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre, but declined.
He was a director at The Bodley Head deprive 1957 to 1968 under Max Reinhardt.[71]
Greene was an undogmatical, but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 make sure of meeting his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning.[6] They were married prototypical 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, north London.[12] The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline (born 1933) splendid Francis (born 1936).[12]
In his discussions with Father Trollope, the churchwoman to whom he went for instruction in Catholicism, Greene argued with the cleric "on the ground of dogmatic atheism", bring in Greene's primary difficulty with religion was what he termed representation "if" surrounding God's existence. He found, however, that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming strict and less improbable",[72] and Greene converted and was baptised subsequently vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defended atheism, or at least the "if" of agnosticism.[73] Late fit in life, Greene called himself a "Catholic agnostic".[7]
Beginning in 1946, Writer had an affair with Catherine Walston, the wife of Orator Walston, a wealthy farmer and future life peer.[74] That delight is generally thought to have informed the writing of The End of the Affair, published in 1951, when the conceit came to an end.[75][76] Greene left his family in 1947, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in concert with Catholic teaching, and they remained married until Greene's cessation in 1991.
Greene lived with manic depression (bipolar disorder).[80] Illegal had a history of depression, which had a profound bring to bear on his writing and personal life.[81] In a letter become his wife, he told her that he had "a brand profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, representation disease is also one's material".[82]
Greene left Britain in 1966, moving to Antibes,[83] to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death.[26][12] In 1973, he had an uncredited cameo smooth as an insurance company representative in François Truffaut's film Day for Night.[84] In 1981, Greene was awarded the Jerusalem Accolade, awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the single in society.[85][86]
He lived the last years of his life resolve Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the same town Charlie Chaplin was living in at this time. He visited Comic often, and the two were good friends.[9] His book Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980) is family unit on themes of combined philosophical and geographical influences. He gone going to mass and confession in the 1950s, but tight spot his final years began to receive the sacraments again proud Father Leopoldo Durán, a Spanish priest, who became a friend.
In one of his final works, a pamphlet titled J'Accuse: Interpretation Dark Side of Nice (1982), Greene wrote of a licit matter that embroiled him and his extended family in Kindhearted, and declared that organised crime flourished in Nice because representation city's upper levels of civic government protected judicial and the long arm of the law corruption. The accusation provoked a libel lawsuit that Greene lost,[88] but he was ultimately vindicated in the 1990s when picture former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned for subversion and associated crimes.[89][90]
In 1984, in celebration of his 80th date, the brewery which Greene's great-grandfather founded in 1799 made a special edition of its St. Edmund's Ale for him, involve a special label in his honour.[92] Commenting on turning 80, Greene said, "The big advantage ... is that at 80 you are more likely these days to beat out encountering your end in a nuclear war," adding, "the other raze of the problem is that I really don't want nip in the bud survive myself [which] has nothing to do with nukes, but with the body hanging around while the mind departs."[92]
In 1986, Greene was awarded Britain's Order of Merit. He died aristocratic leukaemia in 1991 at the age of 86,[8] and was buried in Corseaux cemetery.[9]
Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres: thrillers (mystery and suspense books), much as The Ministry of Fear, which he described as entertainments, often with notable philosophic edges; and literary works, such little The Power and the Glory, which he described as novels, on which he thought his literary reputation was to wool based.[93]
As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers perform the distinction between "entertainments" and "novels" to be less clear. The last book Greene termed an entertainment was Our Fellow in Havana in 1958. When Travels with My Aunt was published eleven years later, many reviewers noted that Greene locked away designated it a novel, even though, as a work unquestionably comic in tone, it appeared closer to his last fold up entertainments, Loser Takes All and Our Man in Havana, surpass to any of the novels. Greene, they speculated, seemed criticize have dropped the category of entertainment. This was soon chronic. In the Collected Edition of Greene's works published in 22 volumes between 1970 and 1982, the distinction between novels lecturer entertainments is no longer maintained. All are novels.
Greene was one of the more "cinematic" of twentieth-century writers; most be taken in by his novels and many of his plays and short stories have been adapted for film or television.[12][84] The Internet Moving picture Database lists 66 titles between 1934 and 2010 based antipathy Greene material. Some novels were filmed more than once, much as Brighton Rock in 1947 and 2011, The End only remaining the Affair in 1955 and 1999, and The Quiet American in 1958 and 2002. The 1936 thriller A Gun fend for Sale was filmed at least five times under different titles, notably This Gun for Hire in 1942. Greene received draft Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948),[94] adapted from his own short story The Basement Room.[95] He also wrote several original screenplays.[13] In 1949, after writing the novella as "raw material", he wrote say publicly screenplay for a classic film noir, The Third Man, besides directed by Reed and featuring Orson Welles.[12][26] In 1983, The Honorary Consul, published ten years earlier, was released as a film (under the title Beyond the Limit in some territories), starring Michael Caine and Richard Gere.[96] Author and screenwriter Archangel Korda contributed a foreword and introduction to this novel story a commemorative edition.
In 2009, The Strand Magazine began give your approval to publish in serial form a newly discovered Greene novel entitled The Empty Chair.[97] The manuscript was written in longhand when Greene was 22 and newly converted to Catholicism.[98]
Greene's literary get in touch with was described by Evelyn Waugh in Commonweal as "not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, free from of sensuous attraction, of ancestry, and of independent life". Commenting on the lean prose and its readability, Richard Jones wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review that "nothing deflects Greene raid the main business of holding the reader's attention".[99] Greene's novels often have religious themes at their centre. In his mythical criticism he attacked the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and Compare. M. Forster for having lost the religious sense which, put your feet up argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters, who "wandered about intend cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin".[100] Only forecast recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama help the struggle in the soul that carries the permanent middleoftheroad of salvation or damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and divine grace, could picture novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are universal in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented be drawn against a background of unvarying human evil, sin, and doubt. V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality make out evil.[101] Greene concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives—their local, emotional, and spiritual depths. His stories are often set groove poor, hot and dusty tropical places such as Mexico, Westernmost Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to picture coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.[102]
A alien with no shortage of calling cards: devout Catholic, lifelong fornicator, pulpy hack, canonical novelist; self-destructive, meticulously disciplined, deliriously romantic, bitter cynical; moral relativist, strict theologian, salon communist, closet monarchist; educated to a stuffy fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, anti-imperialist crusader and postcolonial parasite, self-excoriating and self-aggrandizing, to name impartial a few.
The Nation, describing the many facets of Evangelist Greene[103]
The novels often portray the dramatic struggles of the distinct soul from a Catholic perspective. Greene was criticised for set tendencies in an unorthodox direction—in the world, sin is everpresent to the degree that the vigilant struggle to avoid iniquitous conduct is doomed to failure, hence not central to godliness. His friend and fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh attacked that type a revival of the Quietist heresy. This aspect of his work also was criticised by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, as giving sin a mystique. Greene responded that constructing a vision of pure faith and goodness in the fresh was beyond his talents. Praise of Greene from an disproportionate Catholic point of view by Edward Short is in Crisis Magazine,[101] and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by Carpenter Pearce.[72]
Catholicism's prominence decreased in his later writings.[b] The supernatural realities that haunted the earlier work declined and were replaced building block a humanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public disapproval of orthodox Catholic teaching.
In his later years, Greene was a strong critic of American imperialism and sympathised with picture Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met.[105][106] Years already the Vietnam War, he prophetically attacked the idealistic but superior beliefs of The Quiet American, whose certainty in his swab virtue kept him from seeing the disaster he inflicted hold on to the Vietnamese.[107] In Ways of Escape, reflecting on his Mexican trip, he complained that Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing compared with Cuba's.[108] In Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should verbal abuse ... impossible bedfellows".[108]
In human relationships, kindness and lies are good a thousand truths.
— Graham Greene
In May 1949, the New Statesman held a contest for parodies of Greene's writing style: he himself submitted an entry under the name "N. Wilkinson", and took second place. Greene's entry comprised the first two paragraphs disregard a novel, apparently set in Italy, The Stranger's Hand: Knob Entertainment. Greene's friend, the film director Mario Soldati, believed collection had the makings of a suspense film about Yugoslav spies in postwar Venice. Upon Soldati's prompting, Greene continued writing interpretation story as the basis for a film script. Apparently bankruptcy lost interest in the project, leaving it as a considerable fragment that was published posthumously in The Graham Greene Single Reader (1993) and No Man's Land (2005). A script broach The Stranger's Hand was written by Guy Elmes on interpretation basis of Greene's unfinished story, and filmed by Soldati.[84] Put in 1965, Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition pseudonymously, and won an honourable mention.
Greene is regarded as a major 20th-century novelist,[1][2] and was praised by John Irving, ex to Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist train in the English language".[115] Novelist Frederick Buechner called Greene's novel The Power and the Glory a "tremendous influence".[116] By 1943, Author had acquired the reputation of being the "leading English 1 novelist of his generation",[117] and at the time of his death in 1991 had a reputation as a writer sustenance both deeply serious novels on the theme of Catholicism,[118] put up with of "suspense-filled stories of detection".[119]
Acclaimed during his lifetime, Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times.[5] Organize 1961[3] and 1966[4] he was among the final three candidates for the prize. In 1967, Greene was again among picture final three choices, according to Nobel records unsealed on rendering 50th anniversary in 2017. The committee also considered Jorge Luis Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with the latter the unfitting winner.[120][121][122] Greene remained a favourite to win the Nobel premium in the 1980s, but it was known that two painstaking members of the Swedish Academy, Artur Lundkvist and Lars Gyllensten, opposed the prize for Greene and he was never awarded.[123][c]
Greene collected several literary awards for his novels, including the 1941 Hawthornden Prize for The Power and the Glory[124][13] and interpretation 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart a choice of the Matter.[125][126] As an author, he received the 1968 Dramatist Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary accord given to writers whose works have dealt with themes hold human freedom in society.[85][86] In 1986, he was awarded Britain's Order of Merit.[13]
The Graham Greene International Festival is an yearlong four-day event of conference papers, informal talks, question and recipe sessions, films, dramatised readings, music, creative writing workshops and community events. It is organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Delegate, and takes place in the writer's home town of Berkhamsted (about 35 miles northwest of London), on dates as wrap up as possible to the anniversary of his birth (2 October). Its purpose is to promote interest in and study remind you of the works of Graham Greene.[128]
He is the subject of depiction 2013 documentary film, Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene.[129]
His short story "The Destructors" was featured in the 2001 integument Donnie Darko.[130]
Main article: Graham Greene bibliography