Graham Greene: Difference between revisions
imported>Per$1$tenceofv1$1on "Ways of Escape" makes clear that Greene made at least two visits to Mexico; he is describing his impressions of a recent one. |
imported>Kmccook →Final years: #NOV25- citation to review of Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party |
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{{Short description|British writer, playwright and literary critic (1904–1991)}} | {{Short description|British writer, playwright and literary critic (1904–1991)}} | ||
{{ | {{Other people}} | ||
{{Use British English|date=January 2012}} | {{Use British English|date=January 2012}} | ||
{{Use dmy dates|date=April 2021}} | {{Use dmy dates|date=April 2021}} | ||
{{Infobox writer<!-- for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] --> | {{Infobox writer<!-- for more information see [[:Template:Infobox writer/doc]] --> | ||
| name = Graham Greene | |||
| honorific_suffix = {{postnominals|country=GBR|OM|CH|size=100%}} | | honorific_suffix = {{postnominals|country=GBR|OM|CH|size=100%}} | ||
| image = Graham Greene angol író, 1975 Fortepan 84697.jpg | | image = Graham Greene angol író, 1975 Fortepan 84697.jpg | ||
| image_size = | | image_size = | ||
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| birth_date = {{birth date|df=yes|1904|10|2}} | | birth_date = {{birth date|df=yes|1904|10|2}} | ||
| birth_place = [[Berkhamsted]], [[Hertfordshire]], England | | birth_place = [[Berkhamsted]], [[Hertfordshire]], England | ||
| death_date = {{ | | death_date = {{Death date and age|df=yes|1991|4|3|1904|10|2}} | ||
| death_place = [[Corseaux]], Switzerland | | death_place = [[Corseaux]], Switzerland | ||
| spouse = {{ | | spouse = {{Marriage|[[Vivien Dayrell-Browning]]|1927|1947|end=separated}} | ||
| partner = [[Catherine Walston, Lady Walston]] (1946–1966)<br/>Yvonne Cloetta (1966–1991) | | partner = [[Catherine Walston, Lady Walston]] (1946–1966)<br/>Yvonne Cloetta (1966–1991) | ||
| children = 2 | | children = 2 | ||
| relatives = [[Raymond Greene]] (brother); [[Graham C. Greene]] (nephew) | | relatives = [[Raymond Greene]] (brother); [[Graham C. Greene]] (nephew) | ||
| alma_mater = [[Balliol College, Oxford]] | | alma_mater = [[Balliol College, Oxford]] | ||
| occupation = {{ | | occupation = {{Hlist|Writer|journalist}} | ||
| period = 1925–1991 | | period = 1925–1991 | ||
| genre = {{ | | genre = {{Hlist|[[Literary fiction]]|[[Thriller (genre)|thriller]]}} | ||
|notable_works = {{ | |notable_works = {{Unbulleted list|''[[Stamboul Train]]'' (1932)|''[[Brighton Rock (novel)|Brighton Rock]]'' (1938)|''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' (1940)|''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'' (1948)|''[[The End of the Affair]]'' (1951)|''[[The Quiet American]]'' (1955)| ''[[Our Man in Havana]]'' (1958)}} | ||
| signature = | | signature = | ||
| website = | | website = | ||
}} | }} | ||
'''Henry Graham Greene''' {{ | '''Henry Graham Greene''' {{Postnominals|country=GBR|OM|CH}} (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century. | ||
Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious [[Catholic literary revival|Catholic novels]], and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the [[Nobel Prize in Literature]] several times.<ref name="svd">{{Cite news |last=Neuman |first=Ricki |date=3 January 2012 |title=Graham Greene var nära Nobelpris 1961 |url=https://www.svd.se/a/f028246c-eb8b-3459-ae34-a0fc2731d98d/graham-greene-var-nara-nobelpris-1961 |newspaper=Svenska Dagbladet |language=sv}}</ref><ref name="nobelprize1966">{{Cite web |title=Nomination archive: Graham Greene | date=21 May 2024 |url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=3628}}</ref><ref name=Prize/> Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. ''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' won the 1941 [[Hawthornden Prize]] and ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'' won the 1948 [[James Tait Black Memorial Prize]] and was shortlisted for the [[Best of the James Tait Black]]. Greene was awarded the 1968 [[Shakespeare Prize]] and the 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 (film)|The Fallen Idol]]'' (1948) and ''[[The Third Man]]'' (1949). | Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious [[Catholic literary revival|Catholic novels]], and of thrillers (or "entertainments" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the [[Nobel Prize in Literature]] several times.<ref name="svd">{{Cite news |last=Neuman |first=Ricki |date=3 January 2012 |title=Graham Greene var nära Nobelpris 1961 |url=https://www.svd.se/a/f028246c-eb8b-3459-ae34-a0fc2731d98d/graham-greene-var-nara-nobelpris-1961 |newspaper=Svenska Dagbladet |language=sv}}</ref><ref name="nobelprize1966">{{Cite web |title=Nomination archive: Graham Greene | date=21 May 2024 |url=https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/archive/show_people.php?id=3628}}</ref><ref name=Prize/> Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. ''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' won the 1941 [[Hawthornden Prize]] and ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'' won the 1948 [[James Tait Black Memorial Prize]] and was shortlisted for the [[Best of the James Tait Black]]. Greene was awarded the 1968 [[Shakespeare Prize]] and the 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 (film)|The Fallen Idol]]'' (1948) and ''[[The Third Man]]'' (1949). | ||
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[[File:St. John’s boarding house Berkhamsted 1.jpg|left|thumb|Greene was born in [[Berkhamsted School]] where his father taught.]] | [[File:St. John’s boarding house Berkhamsted 1.jpg|left|thumb|Greene was born in [[Berkhamsted School]] where his father taught.]] | ||
[[File:Graham Greene's Birthplace blue plaque crop.jpg|thumb|upright|Graham Greene's birthplace blue plaque]] | [[File:Graham Greene's Birthplace blue plaque crop.jpg|thumb|upright|Graham Greene's birthplace blue plaque]] | ||
Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St John's House, a [[Boarding school|boarding house]] of [[Berkhamsted School]], Hertfordshire, where his father was house master.<ref name=berkhamsted-tour>{{cite book|last=Cook|first=John|title=A Glimpse of our History: a short guided tour of Berkhamsted|year=2009|publisher=Berkhamsted Town Council|url=http://www.berkhamsted.gov.uk/download/Heritage%20Leaflet.pdf|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110927033250/http://www.berkhamsted.gov.uk/download/Heritage%20Leaflet.pdf|archive-date=27 September 2011}}</ref> He was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, [[Hugh Greene|Hugh]], became [[Director-General of the BBC]],<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> and his elder brother, [[Raymond Greene|Raymond]], an eminent physician and mountaineer.<ref name="timesobit">{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Obituaries: Graham Greene |work=[[The Times]] |issue=63983 |page=16}}</ref> | Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St John's House, a [[Boarding school|boarding house]] of [[Berkhamsted School]], Hertfordshire, where his father was house master.<ref name=berkhamsted-tour>{{cite book|last=Cook|first=John|title=A Glimpse of our History: a short guided tour of Berkhamsted|year=2009|publisher=Berkhamsted Town Council|url=http://www.berkhamsted.gov.uk/download/Heritage%20Leaflet.pdf|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110927033250/http://www.berkhamsted.gov.uk/download/Heritage%20Leaflet.pdf|archive-date=27 September 2011}}</ref> He was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, [[Hugh Greene|Hugh]], became [[Director-General of the BBC]],<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> and his elder brother, [[Raymond Greene|Raymond]], an eminent physician and mountaineer.<ref name="timesobit">{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Obituaries: Graham Greene |work=[[The Times]] |issue=63983 |page=16}}</ref> | ||
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== Writing career == | == Writing career == | ||
[[File:Graham Greene in 1939.jpg|thumb|Greene in 1939]] | |||
After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the ''[[Nottingham Journal]]'',<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.biogs.com/famous/greenegraham.html |title=Graham Greene |publisher=Biogs.com |access-date=2 June 2010}}</ref><ref name="timesobit"/> and then as a [[copy editing|sub-editor]] on ''[[The Times]]''.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> While he was still at Oxford, he had started corresponding with [[Vivien Greene|Vivien Dayrell-Browning]], who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/><ref name="telly"/>{{sfn|Sherry|1990|p=179}} Greene was an agnostic, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in his autobiography ''[[A Sort of Life]]'', he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held".{{sfn|Greene|1971|pp=164-165}} Greene was baptised on 28 February 1926{{sfn|Sinyard|2003|p=3}} and they married on 15 October 1927 at [[St Mary's Church, Hampstead]], London.{{sfn|Sherry|1990|pp=352-354}} | After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the ''[[Nottingham Journal]]'',<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.biogs.com/famous/greenegraham.html |title=Graham Greene |publisher=Biogs.com |access-date=2 June 2010}}</ref><ref name="timesobit"/> and then as a [[copy editing|sub-editor]] on ''[[The Times]]''.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> While he was still at Oxford, he had started corresponding with [[Vivien Greene|Vivien Dayrell-Browning]], who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/><ref name="telly"/>{{sfn|Sherry|1990|p=179}} Greene was an agnostic, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in his autobiography ''[[A Sort of Life]]'', he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held".{{sfn|Greene|1971|pp=164-165}} Greene was baptised on 28 February 1926{{sfn|Sinyard|2003|p=3}} and they married on 15 October 1927 at [[St Mary's Church, Hampstead]], London.{{sfn|Sherry|1990|pp=352-354}} | ||
''[[The Man Within]]'' (1929) was Greene's first published novel;{{efn|This was the third novel Greene had completed.<ref name="thomson"/> In 2009, a newly discovered manuscript titled ''The Empty Chair'', written in longhand when Greene was 22 and a recent convert to Catholicism, appeared in ''[[The Strand Magazine]]'' in serial form.<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/09/grahamgreene-fiction | work=[[The Guardian]] | title=Lost Greene novel to be serialised in crime magazine | first=Alison | last=Flood | date=9 July 2009 | access-date=21 December 2024}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last=McGrath |first=Charles |author-link=Charles McGrath (critic) |date=14 July 2009 |title='New' Graham Greene Mystery To Be Published |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/books/15arts-NEWGRAHAMGRE_BRF.html |access-date=21 December 2024 |work=[[The New York Times]]}}</ref>}} after its favourable reception he left his job at ''The Times'' to work full-time as a novelist.<ref>{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Farewell to the icy slopes of Greeneland |first=Philip |last=Howard |author-link=Philip Howard (journalist) |work=[[The Times]] |issue=63983 |page=1}}</ref><ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> The next two books, ''[[The Name of Action]]'' (1930) and ''[[Rumour at Nightfall]]'' (1932), were unsuccessful, however,<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> and he later disowned them.<ref name="timesobit"/>{{ | ''[[The Man Within]]'' (1929) was Greene's first published novel;{{efn|This was the third novel Greene had completed.<ref name="thomson"/> In 2009, a newly discovered manuscript titled ''The Empty Chair'', written in longhand when Greene was 22 and a recent convert to Catholicism, appeared in ''[[The Strand Magazine]]'' in serial form.<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/09/grahamgreene-fiction | work=[[The Guardian]] | title=Lost Greene novel to be serialised in crime magazine | first=Alison | last=Flood | date=9 July 2009 | access-date=21 December 2024}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last=McGrath |first=Charles |author-link=Charles McGrath (critic) |date=14 July 2009 |title='New' Graham Greene Mystery To Be Published |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/books/15arts-NEWGRAHAMGRE_BRF.html |access-date=21 December 2024 |work=[[The New York Times]]}}</ref>}} after its favourable reception he left his job at ''The Times'' to work full-time as a novelist.<ref>{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Farewell to the icy slopes of Greeneland |first=Philip |last=Howard |author-link=Philip Howard (journalist) |work=[[The Times]] |issue=63983 |page=1}}</ref><ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> The next two books, ''[[The Name of Action]]'' (1930) and ''[[Rumour at Nightfall]]'' (1932), were unsuccessful, however,<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> and he later disowned them.<ref name="timesobit"/>{{Efn|In 1974, Greene said he had suppressed them from the [[Bodley Head]]–[[Heinemann (publisher)|Heinemann]] ''Collected Edition'' of his works "without hesitation".<ref name="1974train">{{Cite news |date=21 June 1974 |title=Train of Thought |first=Graham |last=Greene |work=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |issue=37038 |page=61}}</ref>}} His first true success was ''[[Stamboul Train]]'' (1932) which was taken on by the Book Society{{sfn|Sherry|1990|p=442}} and adapted as the film ''[[Orient Express (1934 film)|Orient Express]]'', in 1934.<ref>{{Cite web|title="Orient Express." AFI Catalog.|url=https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/MovieDetails/4997|access-date=2024-08-20}}</ref> | ||
Although Greene objected to being described as a [[Roman Catholic]] novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic,{{efn|For example, when [[Anthony Burgess]] asked Greene in an interview whether his novels were the first "in English to present evil as something palpable—not a theological abstraction but an entity", Greene replied, "I see we're getting on to myself as a Catholic novelist. I'm not that: I'm a novelist who happens to be a Catholic. The theme of human beings lonely without God is a legitimate fictional subject. To want to deal with the theme doesn't make me a theologian."<ref name="burgess">{{Cite news |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |author-link=Anthony Burgess |date=16 March 1980 |title='God and literature and so forth...' |work=[[The Observer]] |pages=33, 35}}</ref> Greene rejected the label on other occasions.<ref name="ratcliffe"/><ref name="nytobit"/>{{sfn|Sinyard|2003|p=3}}}} Catholic religious [[theme (literature)|themes]] are at the root of much of his writing, especially ''[[Brighton Rock (novel)|Brighton Rock]]'', ''The Power and the Glory'', ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'', and ''[[The End of the Affair]]'',<ref name=mcgowin>[http://www.eclectica.org/v8n4/mcgowin_greene.html Graham Greene, The Major Novels: A Centenary] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140127085400/http://www.eclectica.org/v8n4/mcgowin_greene.html |date=27 January 2014 }} by [[Kevin McGowin]], ''[[Eclectica Magazine]]''</ref> which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel.<ref>{{cite book|url= https://books.google.com/books?id=JMLSvJ096KQC&pg=PA3|page=3|title=Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination|first=Mark |last=Bosco|author-link=Mark Bosco|publisher=Oxford University Press|date= 21 January 2005|isbn=9780198039358}}</ref> Several works, such as ''[[The Confidential Agent]]'', ''[[The Quiet American]]'', ''[[Our Man in Havana]]'', ''[[The Human Factor (novel)|The Human Factor]]'', and his screenplay for ''[[The Third Man]]'', also show Greene's avid interest in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage. In the early 1930s Greene moved to the left politically. He read left-wing writers like [[G. D. H. Cole|G.D.H. Cole]] and [[John Strachey (politician)|John Strachey]]; in 1933 he joined the [[Independent Labour Party]]. This move to the left is reflected in the characters and plot of his fifth novel [[It's a Battlefield|''It's A Battlefield'']].{{sfn|Sherry|1990|pp=410, 456–461}} His later political affiliations and convictions were more ambiguous.{{sfn|Sherry|1994|pp=479, 494–496}} | Although Greene objected to being described as a [[Roman Catholic]] novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic,{{efn|For example, when [[Anthony Burgess]] asked Greene in an interview whether his novels were the first "in English to present evil as something palpable—not a theological abstraction but an entity", Greene replied, "I see we're getting on to myself as a Catholic novelist. I'm not that: I'm a novelist who happens to be a Catholic. The theme of human beings lonely without God is a legitimate fictional subject. To want to deal with the theme doesn't make me a theologian."<ref name="burgess">{{Cite news |last=Burgess |first=Anthony |author-link=Anthony Burgess |date=16 March 1980 |title='God and literature and so forth...' |work=[[The Observer]] |pages=33, 35}}</ref> Greene rejected the label on other occasions.<ref name="ratcliffe"/><ref name="nytobit"/>{{sfn|Sinyard|2003|p=3}}}} Catholic religious [[theme (literature)|themes]] are at the root of much of his writing, especially ''[[Brighton Rock (novel)|Brighton Rock]]'', ''The Power and the Glory'', ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'', and ''[[The End of the Affair]]'',<ref name=mcgowin>[http://www.eclectica.org/v8n4/mcgowin_greene.html Graham Greene, The Major Novels: A Centenary] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140127085400/http://www.eclectica.org/v8n4/mcgowin_greene.html |date=27 January 2014 }} by [[Kevin McGowin]], ''[[Eclectica Magazine]]''</ref> which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel.<ref>{{cite book|url= https://books.google.com/books?id=JMLSvJ096KQC&pg=PA3|page=3|title=Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination|first=Mark |last=Bosco|author-link=Mark Bosco|publisher=Oxford University Press|date= 21 January 2005|isbn=9780198039358}}</ref> Several works, such as ''[[The Confidential Agent]]'', ''[[The Quiet American]]'', ''[[Our Man in Havana]]'', ''[[The Human Factor (novel)|The Human Factor]]'', and his screenplay for ''[[The Third Man]]'', also show Greene's avid interest in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage. In the early 1930s Greene moved to the left politically. He read left-wing writers like [[G. D. H. Cole|G.D.H. Cole]] and [[John Strachey (politician)|John Strachey]]; in 1933 he joined the [[Independent Labour Party]]. This move to the left is reflected in the characters and plot of his fifth novel [[It's a Battlefield|''It's A Battlefield'']].{{sfn|Sherry|1990|pp=410, 456–461}} His later political affiliations and convictions were more ambiguous.{{sfn|Sherry|1994|pp=479, 494–496}} | ||
He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for ''[[The Spectator]]'', and co-editing the magazine ''Night and Day''.{{sfn|Greene|1981|p=59}}<ref name="thomson"/> His collected film reviews were later published as ''The Pleasure Dome'' (1972).<ref>{{cite book |author-last=Greene |author-first=Graham |editor-last=Taylor |editor-first=John Russell |editor-link=John Russell Taylor |year=1980 |orig-date=1st pub. [[Secker & Warburg]] 1972 |title=The Pleasure Dome: Collected Film Criticism 1935-40 |location=Oxford |url=https://archive.org/details/pleasuredomegrah00gree |url-access=registration |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=0-19-281286-6 }}</ref> Greene's 1937 film review<ref>{{cite web|url=http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/02/25/graham-greenes-infamous-review-of-wee-willie-winkie-1937-starring-shirley-temple|title=Graham Greene's infamous review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937), starring Shirley Temple | He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for ''[[The Spectator]]'', and co-editing the magazine ''Night and Day''.{{sfn|Greene|1981|p=59}}<ref name="thomson"/> His collected film reviews were later published as ''The Pleasure Dome'' (1972).<ref>{{cite book |author-last=Greene |author-first=Graham |editor-last=Taylor |editor-first=John Russell |editor-link=John Russell Taylor |year=1980 |orig-date=1st pub. [[Secker & Warburg]] 1972 |title=The Pleasure Dome: Collected Film Criticism 1935-40 |location=Oxford |url=https://archive.org/details/pleasuredomegrah00gree |url-access=registration |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]] |isbn=0-19-281286-6 }}</ref> Greene's 1937 film review<ref>{{cite web|url=http://thecharnelhouse.org/2014/02/25/graham-greenes-infamous-review-of-wee-willie-winkie-1937-starring-shirley-temple|title=Graham Greene's infamous review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937), starring Shirley Temple |website=The Charnel-House|date=26 February 2014 |access-date=4 December 2014}}</ref> of ''[[Wee Willie Winkie (film)|Wee Willie Winkie]]'', for ''Night and Day''—which said that the nine-year-old star, [[Shirley Temple]], displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen"{{sfn|Parkinson|1995|pp=233-234}}—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/our-man-in-london-20090821|title=Our Man in London|first=Michael |last=Atkinson|date=21 August 2009|publisher=movingimagesource.us}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine|url=http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/long-life/9141712/alexander-chancellor-maybe-its-because-im-not-a-clergyman-or-jimmy-savile-but-shirley-temple-doesnt-do-it-for-me/|title=Was Graham Greene right about Shirley Temple? |first=Alexander |last=Chancellor|magazine=The Spectator|date=22 February 2014}}</ref> and Greene left the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over.<ref name=Johnson>{{cite news|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/shirley-temple-scandal-was-real-reason-graham-greene-fled-to-mexico-400856.html|title= Shirley Temple scandal was real reason Graham Greene fled to Mexico|newspaper=The Independent|date=18 November 2007|first=Andrew |last=Johnson}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/chasinglolitahow00vick|url-access=registration|page=[https://archive.org/details/chasinglolitahow00vick/page/64 64]|title=Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again|first=Graham|last= Vickers|publisher=Chicago Review Press|date= 1 August 2008|isbn=9781556526824}}</ref> While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece, ''The Power and the Glory''.<ref name=Johnson/><ref name="timesobit"/> | ||
|website=The Charnel-House|date=26 February 2014 | |||
|access-date=4 December 2014}}</ref> of ''[[Wee Willie Winkie (film)|Wee Willie Winkie]]'', for ''Night and Day''—which said that the nine-year-old star, [[Shirley Temple]], displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen"{{sfn|Parkinson|1995|pp=233-234}}—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/our-man-in-london-20090821|title=Our Man in London|first=Michael |last=Atkinson|date=21 August 2009|publisher=movingimagesource.us}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine|url=http://www.spectator.co.uk/life/long-life/9141712/alexander-chancellor-maybe-its-because-im-not-a-clergyman-or-jimmy-savile-but-shirley-temple-doesnt-do-it-for-me/|title=Was Graham Greene right about Shirley Temple? |first=Alexander |last=Chancellor|magazine=The Spectator|date=22 February 2014}}</ref> and Greene left the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over.<ref name=Johnson>{{cite news|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/shirley-temple-scandal-was-real-reason-graham-greene-fled-to-mexico-400856.html|title= Shirley Temple scandal was real reason Graham Greene fled to Mexico|newspaper=The Independent|date=18 November 2007|first=Andrew |last=Johnson}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/chasinglolitahow00vick|url-access=registration|page=[https://archive.org/details/chasinglolitahow00vick/page/64 64]|title=Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again|first=Graham|last= Vickers|publisher=Chicago Review Press|date= 1 August 2008|isbn=9781556526824}}</ref> While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece, ''The Power and the Glory''.<ref name=Johnson/><ref name="timesobit"/> | |||
By the 1950s, Greene had become known as one of the finest writers of his generation.<ref>{{cite book |last=Barrett |first=D. |year=2009 |chapter=Graham Greene |editor-first=A. |editor-last=Poole |title=The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists |url=https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00pool |url-access=limited |series=Cambridge Companions to Literature |pages=[https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00pool/page/n435 423]–437 |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/CCOL9780521871198.027 |isbn=9780521871198 }}</ref><ref>[https://earlybirdbooks.com/must-read-graham-greene-books 13 Must-Read Graham Greene Books] ''earlybirdbooks.com'', accessed 31 October 2020</ref> | By the 1950s, Greene had become known as one of the finest writers of his generation.<ref>{{cite book |last=Barrett |first=D. |year=2009 |chapter=Graham Greene |editor-first=A. |editor-last=Poole |title=The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists |url=https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00pool |url-access=limited |series=Cambridge Companions to Literature |pages=[https://archive.org/details/cambridgecompani00pool/page/n435 423]–437 |location=Cambridge |publisher=Cambridge University Press |doi=10.1017/CCOL9780521871198.027 |isbn=9780521871198 }}</ref><ref>[https://earlybirdbooks.com/must-read-graham-greene-books 13 Must-Read Graham Greene Books] ''earlybirdbooks.com'', accessed 31 October 2020</ref> | ||
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=== Travel and espionage === | === Travel and espionage === | ||
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.<ref name="nytobit">{{cite news|title=Graham Greene, 86, Dies; Novelist of the Soul|newspaper=[[The New York Times]]|access-date=16 May 2024|date=4 April 1991|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/04/obituaries/graham-greene-86-dies-novelist-of-the-soul.html}}</ref><ref name="latobit">{{cite news| url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-04-04-mn-2469-story.html | work=[[The Los Angeles Times]] | title=Graham Greene Dies; One of Century's Great Writers | first=Frank | last=Clifford | date=4 April 1991 | access-date=8 June 2025}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |last=Iyengar |first=Sunil |date=13 January 2021 |title=Our Man in the Stacks |url=https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/our-man-in-the-stacks/ |access-date=15 May 2024 |work=[[Los Angeles Review of Books]]}}</ref> Greene himself responded to commentators who called the world of his fiction an imaginary place: | |||
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.<ref name="nytobit">{{cite news|title=Graham Greene, 86, Dies; Novelist of the Soul|newspaper=[[The New York Times]]|access-date=16 May 2024|date=4 April 1991|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/04/obituaries/graham-greene-86-dies-novelist-of-the-soul.html}}</ref><ref name="latobit">{{cite news| url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-04-04-mn-2469-story.html | work=[[The Los Angeles Times]] | title=Graham Greene Dies; One of | |||
{{quote|Some critics have referred to a strange violent 'seedy' region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go around the world blinkered. 'This is [[Indo-China]],' I want to exclaim, 'this is [[Mexico]], this is [[Sierra Leone]] carefully and accurately described. I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the canal of [[Phát Diệm|Phat Diem]] the bodies stuck out of the water...'{{sfn|Greene|1981|p=60}}}} | {{quote|Some critics have referred to a strange violent 'seedy' region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go around the world blinkered. 'This is [[Indo-China]],' I want to exclaim, 'this is [[Mexico]], this is [[Sierra Leone]] carefully and accurately described. I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the canal of [[Phát Diệm|Phat Diem]] the bodies stuck out of the water...'{{sfn|Greene|1981|p=60}}}} | ||
Throughout his life, Greene travelled to what he called the world's wild and remote places. In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited into [[Secret Intelligence Service|MI6]] by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War.<ref>Christopher Hawtree. [https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/feb/10/guardianobituaries "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys"]. ''The Guardian'', 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011.</ref> [[Kim Philby]], who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6.<ref>{{cite web |last=Royal |first=Robert |date=November 1999 |title=The (Mis)Guided Dream of Graham Greene |url=http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3226 |access-date=2 June 2010 |work=First Things}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/graham-greene.shtml |title=BBC—BBC Four Documentaries—Arena: Graham Greene |work=BBC News |date=3 October 2004 |access-date=2 June 2010}}</ref> Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Brennan|first=Michael G.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VRkdCgAAQBAJ|title=Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith and Authorship|date=18 March 2010|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|isbn=978-1-4411-3742-5|language=en}}</ref> He later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, ''My Silent War''.<ref>Greene's introduction to the Philby book is mentioned in Christopher Hitchens' introduction to ''Our Man in Havana'' (pg xx of the Penguin Classics edition)</ref> | Throughout his life, Greene travelled to what he called the world's wild and remote places. In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited into [[Secret Intelligence Service|MI6]] by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War.<ref>Christopher Hawtree. [https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/feb/10/guardianobituaries "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys"]. ''The Guardian'', 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011.</ref> [[Kim Philby]], who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6.<ref>{{cite web |last=Royal |first=Robert |date=November 1999 |title=The (Mis)Guided Dream of Graham Greene |url=http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3226 |access-date=2 June 2010 |work=First Things |archive-date=30 September 2008 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080930224500/http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3226 |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/graham-greene.shtml |title=BBC—BBC Four Documentaries—Arena: Graham Greene |work=BBC News |date=3 October 2004 |access-date=2 June 2010}}</ref> Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Brennan|first=Michael G.|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=VRkdCgAAQBAJ|title=Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith and Authorship|date=18 March 2010|publisher=Bloomsbury Publishing|isbn=978-1-4411-3742-5|language=en}}</ref> He later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, ''My Silent War''.<ref>Greene's introduction to the Philby book is mentioned in Christopher Hitchens' introduction to ''Our Man in Havana'' (pg xx of the Penguin Classics edition)</ref> | ||
Greene also corresponded with intelligence officer and spy, [[John Cairncross]], for forty years and that correspondence is held by the John J. Burns Library, at [[Boston College]].<ref>"[https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=d&d=bcchronicle19991014-01.2.10 The Spy Who Wrote Me: Burns Lands Graham Greene Correspondence With Soviet Agent]." ''Boston College Chronicle'', Volume 8, Number 4, 14 October 1999.</ref> | Greene also corresponded with intelligence officer and spy, [[John Cairncross]], for forty years and that correspondence is held by the John J. Burns Library, at [[Boston College]].<ref>"[https://newspapers.bc.edu/?a=d&d=bcchronicle19991014-01.2.10 The Spy Who Wrote Me: Burns Lands Graham Greene Correspondence With Soviet Agent]." ''Boston College Chronicle'', Volume 8, Number 4, 14 October 1999.</ref> | ||
Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip to [[Liberia]] that produced the travel book ''[[Journey Without Maps]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.historytoday.com/tim-butcher/graham-greene-our-man-liberia|title=Graham Greene: Our Man in Liberia|last=Butcher|first=Tim|year=2010|work=History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 10|access-date=20 March 2012|quote=insisted this trip, his first to Africa and his first outside Europe}}</ref> His 1938 trip to Mexico to see the 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 (publisher)|Tom Burns]].<ref name="thomson">{{cite web |last=Thomson |first=Ian |author-link=Ian Thomson (writer)|date=22 August 2006 |title=Graham Greene, uneasy Catholic |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110615070843/http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_selections/commentary/article2305784.ece | | Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip to [[Liberia]] that produced the travel book ''[[Journey Without Maps]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.historytoday.com/tim-butcher/graham-greene-our-man-liberia|title=Graham Greene: Our Man in Liberia|last=Butcher|first=Tim|year=2010|work=History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 10|access-date=20 March 2012|quote=insisted this trip, his first to Africa and his first outside Europe}}</ref> His 1938 trip to Mexico to see the 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 (publisher)|Tom Burns]].<ref name="thomson">{{cite web |last=Thomson |first=Ian |author-link=Ian Thomson (writer)|date=22 August 2006 |title=Graham Greene, uneasy Catholic |url=http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_selections/commentary/article2305784.ece |access-date=28 June 2025 |work=[[Times Literary Supplement]]|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110615070843/http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/tls_selections/commentary/article2305784.ece |archive-date=15 June 2011 }}</ref> That voyage produced two books, the nonfiction ''[[The Lawless Roads]]'' (published as ''Another Mexico'' in the US) and the novel ''[[The Power and the Glory]]''. In 1953, the [[Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith|Holy Office]] informed Greene that ''The Power and the Glory'' was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene, [[Pope Paul VI]] told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1005484.stm |title=EUROPE | Vatican's bid to censure Graham Greene |work=BBC News |date=3 November 2000 |access-date=2 June 2010}}</ref> | ||
In 1950 his brother, Hugh Carleton Greene who was head of UK Information Services in [[British Malaya|Malaya]], brought Greene to Malaya during the early phase of the [[Malayan Emergency]].<ref>{{cite journal | |||
| last = Ruane | |||
| first = Kevin | |||
| title = The Hidden History of Graham Greene’s Vietnam War: Fact, Fiction and ''The Quiet American'' | |||
| journal = History (London) | |||
| volume = 97 | |||
| issue = 327 | |||
| year = 2012 | |||
| pages = 431–452 | |||
}}</ref>Greene returned to England via Indo-China in 1951 to visit his friend, Trevor Wilson, British consul in Hanoi. There he met General [[Jean de Lattre de Tassigny]], French high commissioner and commander-in-chief of the French Expeditionary Corps. Greene returned several times and wrote newspaper articles<ref>{{Cite magazine | |||
| last = Greene | |||
| first = Graham | |||
| title = France’s Crown of Thorns | |||
| magazine = Paris Match | |||
| date = 12 July 1952 | |||
}}</ref> | |||
<ref>{{Cite news | |||
| last = Greene | |||
| first = Graham | |||
| title = Return to Indo-China | |||
| work = Sunday Times | |||
| date = 21 March 1954 | |||
}}</ref> and developed the book, ''The Quiet American''. | |||
In 1954, Greene travelled to [[Haiti]],<ref>{{cite book |last=Theroux |first=Paul |author-link=Paul Theroux |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lmD7JS7jw3MC&pg=PR5 |title=Introduction to The Comedians |date=1 January 2004 |publisher=Random House |isbn=9780099478379 |page=v}}</ref> where ''[[The Comedians (novel)|The Comedians]]'' (1966) is set,<ref>{{cite book|first=Bernard |last=Diederich|author-link=Bernard Diederich|date= 2012|title=Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954–1983|publisher= Peter Owen}}</ref> and which was then under the rule of dictator [[François Duvalier]], known as "Papa Doc", frequently staying at the [[Hotel Oloffson]] in [[Port-au-Prince]].<ref>{{cite news |last=Campbell |first=Duncan |date=17 December 2005 |title=Drinking, dancing and death |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/17/grahamgreene |newspaper=The Guardian}}</ref> He visited Haiti again in the late 1950s. As inspiration for his novel ''[[A Burnt-Out Case]]'' (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of [[leper colony|leper colonies]] in the [[Congo Basin]] and in what were then the [[British Cameroons]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Greene |first=Graham |date=1961 |title=A Burnt-Out Case |url=https://archive.org/details/burntoutcase00gree|url-access=registration |location=New York (Amer. ed.) |publisher=The Viking Press |page=vii–viii }}</ref> During this trip in late February and early March 1959, Greene met several times with [[Andrée de Jongh]], a leader in the Belgian resistance during WWII, who famously established an escape route to Gibraltar through the Pyrenees for downed allied airmen.<ref>{{cite book |last=Neave |first=Airey |author-link=Airey Neave |year=1970 |title=The Escape Room |location=[[Garden City, New York]] |publisher=[[Doubleday (publisher)|Doubleday]] |pages=126–127 }}</ref> | In 1954, Greene travelled to [[Haiti]],<ref>{{cite book |last=Theroux |first=Paul |author-link=Paul Theroux |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=lmD7JS7jw3MC&pg=PR5 |title=Introduction to The Comedians |date=1 January 2004 |publisher=Random House |isbn=9780099478379 |page=v}}</ref> where ''[[The Comedians (novel)|The Comedians]]'' (1966) is set,<ref>{{cite book|first=Bernard |last=Diederich|author-link=Bernard Diederich|date= 2012|title=Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954–1983|publisher= Peter Owen}}</ref> and which was then under the rule of dictator [[François Duvalier]], known as "Papa Doc", frequently staying at the [[Hotel Oloffson]] in [[Port-au-Prince]].<ref>{{cite news |last=Campbell |first=Duncan |date=17 December 2005 |title=Drinking, dancing and death |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2005/dec/17/grahamgreene |newspaper=The Guardian}}</ref> He visited Haiti again in the late 1950s. As inspiration for his novel ''[[A Burnt-Out Case]]'' (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of [[leper colony|leper colonies]] in the [[Congo Basin]] and in what were then the [[British Cameroons]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Greene |first=Graham |date=1961 |title=A Burnt-Out Case |url=https://archive.org/details/burntoutcase00gree|url-access=registration |location=New York (Amer. ed.) |publisher=The Viking Press |page=vii–viii }}</ref> During this trip in late February and early March 1959, Greene met several times with [[Andrée de Jongh]], a leader in the Belgian resistance during WWII, who famously established an escape route to Gibraltar through the Pyrenees for downed allied airmen.<ref>{{cite book |last=Neave |first=Airey |author-link=Airey Neave |year=1970 |title=The Escape Room |location=[[Garden City, New York]] |publisher=[[Doubleday (publisher)|Doubleday]] |pages=126–127 }}</ref> | ||
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== Personal life == | == Personal life == | ||
Greene was an [[agnostic]], but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 after meeting his future wife [[Vivien Greene|Vivien Dayrell-Browning]].<ref name=Donaghy1983/> They were married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, north London.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936).<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> | Greene was an [[agnostic]], but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 after meeting his future wife [[Vivien Greene|Vivien Dayrell-Browning]].<ref name=Donaghy1983/> They were married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, north London.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline Bourget Greene (born 1933) and Francis Greene (born 1936), who was his father's literary executor.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/> | ||
In his discussions with Father George Trollope,<ref name="Christendom">{{cite web | url=https://media.christendom.edu/2003/12/like-a-birthmark-graham-greenes-catholicism/ | title="Like a Birthmark": Graham Greene's Catholicism | date=26 December 2003 }}</ref> the priest to whom he went for instruction in [[Catholicism]], Greene argued with the cleric "on the ground of dogmatic atheism", as Greene's primary difficulty with religion was what he termed the "if" surrounding God's existence. He found, however, that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming less and less improbable",<ref name="Pearce">Joseph Pearce. [http://www.catholicauthors.com/greene.html "Graham Greene: Doubter Par Excellence"], CatholicAuthors.com. Retrieved 7 January 2011.</ref> and Greene converted and was baptised after vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defended [[atheism]], or at least the "if" of [[agnosticism]].<ref>''The Power and the Glory'' New York: Viking, 1990. Introduction by [[John Updike]], p. xiv.</ref> Late in life, Greene called himself a "Catholic agnostic".<ref name="Sweeney2008"/> | In his discussions with Father George Trollope,<ref name="Christendom">{{cite web | url=https://media.christendom.edu/2003/12/like-a-birthmark-graham-greenes-catholicism/ | title="Like a Birthmark": Graham Greene's Catholicism | date=26 December 2003 }}</ref> the priest to whom he went for instruction in [[Catholicism]], Greene argued with the cleric "on the ground of dogmatic atheism", as Greene's primary difficulty with religion was what he termed the "if" surrounding God's existence. He found, however, that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming less and less improbable",<ref name="Pearce">Joseph Pearce. [http://www.catholicauthors.com/greene.html "Graham Greene: Doubter Par Excellence"], CatholicAuthors.com. Retrieved 7 January 2011.</ref> and Greene converted and was baptised after vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defended [[atheism]], or at least the "if" of [[agnosticism]].<ref>''The Power and the Glory'' New York: Viking, 1990. Introduction by [[John Updike]], p. xiv.</ref> Late in life, Greene called himself a "Catholic agnostic".<ref name="Sweeney2008"/> | ||
Beginning in 1946, Greene had an affair with [[Catherine Walston]], the wife of [[Henry Walston, Baron Walston|Henry Walston]], a wealthy farmer and future [[life peer]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jan/16/fiction.grahamgreene|work=The Guardian|title=Scrabble and strife: Graham Greene's love affair with the mysterious 'C' was hardly a secret—the real truth lies in the private letters they left behind|first=Robert|last= McCrum|author-link=Robert McCrum|date= 16 January 2000}}</ref> That relationship is generally thought to have informed the writing of ''[[The End of the Affair]]'', published in 1951, when the relationship came to an end.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LY7r0MIuaNsC&pg=PA181|title=The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones|first=Adam |last=Schwartz|publisher=CUA Press|date= 1 February 2005|pages=181–182|isbn=9780813213873}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3535475/Graham-Greenes-love-poems-to-mistress-who-inspired-The-End-of-the-Affair.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220111/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3535475/Graham-Greenes-love-poems-to-mistress-who-inspired-The-End-of-the-Affair.html |archive-date=11 January 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|title=Graham Greene's love poems to mistress who inspired The End of the Affair|first=Chris|last= Hastings |date= 29 November 2008|work= The Daily Telegraph}}{{cbignore}}</ref> Greene left his family in 1947,{{sfn|Sherry|1994|pp=275-276}} but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching,{{sfn|Sherry|1994|pp=283-287}} and they remained married until Greene's death in 1991.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Hawtree |first=Christopher |date=2003-08-21 |title=Vivien Greene: Wife of Graham Greene and collector of doll's houses |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/vivien-greene-36971.html |access-date=2025-06-07 |work=[[The Independent]]}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Luther |first=Claudia |date=2003-08-25 |title=Vivien Greene, 98; Wife of Novelist Was a Collector of Dollhouses |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-aug-25-me-greene25-story.html |access-date=2025-06-07 |work=[[The Los Angeles Times]]}}</ref> | Beginning in 1946, Greene had an affair with [[Catherine Walston]], the wife of [[Henry Walston, Baron Walston|Henry Walston]], a wealthy farmer and future [[life peer]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jan/16/fiction.grahamgreene|work=The Guardian|title=Scrabble and strife: Graham Greene's love affair with the mysterious 'C' was hardly a secret—the real truth lies in the private letters they left behind|first=Robert|last= McCrum|author-link=Robert McCrum|date= 16 January 2000}}</ref> That relationship is generally thought to have informed the writing of ''[[The End of the Affair]]'', published in 1951, when the relationship came to an end.<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=LY7r0MIuaNsC&pg=PA181|title=The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones|first=Adam |last=Schwartz|publisher=CUA Press|date= 1 February 2005|pages=181–182|isbn=9780813213873}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3535475/Graham-Greenes-love-poems-to-mistress-who-inspired-The-End-of-the-Affair.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220111/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3535475/Graham-Greenes-love-poems-to-mistress-who-inspired-The-End-of-the-Affair.html |archive-date=11 January 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live|title=Graham Greene's love poems to mistress who inspired The End of the Affair|first=Chris|last= Hastings |date= 29 November 2008|work= The Daily Telegraph}}{{cbignore}}</ref> | ||
Greene left his family in 1947,{{sfn|Sherry|1994|pp=275-276}} but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching,{{sfn|Sherry|1994|pp=283-287}} and they remained married until Greene's death in 1991.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Hawtree |first=Christopher |date=2003-08-21 |title=Vivien Greene: Wife of Graham Greene and collector of doll's houses |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/vivien-greene-36971.html |access-date=2025-06-07 |work=[[The Independent]]}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Luther |first=Claudia |date=2003-08-25 |title=Vivien Greene, 98; Wife of Novelist Was a Collector of Dollhouses |url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-aug-25-me-greene25-story.html |access-date=2025-06-07 |work=[[The Los Angeles Times]]}}</ref> | |||
Greene lived with manic depression ([[bipolar disorder]]).{{sfn|Sherry|2004|p=252}}<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/revealed-graham-greenes-restless-tortured-last-years-1170530.html|title=Graham Greene Bipolar|first=Vanessa|last= Thorpe |date= 9 August 1998|work= The Independent}}</ref> He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2439198.ece|title=Extract from Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene|date=13 September 2007|work=The Times|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110517070311/http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2439198.ece|archive-date=17 May 2011}}</ref> In a letter to his wife, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/graham-greene-a-life-in-letters/2007/11/30/1196394602841.html |title=Graham Greene: A Life In Letters – Book Reviews – Books – Entertainment |work=The Sydney Morning Herald |date=30 November 2007 |access-date=2 June 2010}}</ref> | Greene lived with manic depression ([[bipolar disorder]]).{{sfn|Sherry|2004|p=252}}<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/revealed-graham-greenes-restless-tortured-last-years-1170530.html|title=Graham Greene Bipolar|first=Vanessa|last= Thorpe |date= 9 August 1998|work= The Independent}}</ref> He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life.<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2439198.ece|title=Extract from Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene|date=13 September 2007|work=The Times|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110517070311/http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2439198.ece|archive-date=17 May 2011}}</ref> In a letter to his wife, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/graham-greene-a-life-in-letters/2007/11/30/1196394602841.html |title=Graham Greene: A Life In Letters – Book Reviews – Books – Entertainment |work=The Sydney Morning Herald |date=30 November 2007 |access-date=2 June 2010}}</ref> | ||
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Greene left Britain in 1966, moving to [[Antibes]],<ref>{{cite news |title=Reading group: Travels with My Aunt and the many shades of Greene |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/reading-group-travels-with-my-aunt-greene |access-date=16 May 2022 |first=Sam |last=Jordison|work=[[The Guardian]] |date=15 June 2012 |language=en}}</ref> to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/><ref name="telly"/> In 1973, he had an uncredited [[cameo appearance]] as an insurance company representative in [[François Truffaut]]'s film ''[[Day for Night (film)|Day for Night]]''.<ref name="caterson"/> In 1981, Greene was awarded the [[Jerusalem Prize]], awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.<ref name="jbook"/><ref name="shipler">{{cite news| url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-protests.html | work=[[The New York Times]] | title=Israeli Book Fair Honors Greene, Amid Protests | first=David K. | last=Shipler | author-link=David K. Shipler | date=7 April 1981 | access-date=23 October 2024}}</ref> | Greene left Britain in 1966, moving to [[Antibes]],<ref>{{cite news |title=Reading group: Travels with My Aunt and the many shades of Greene |url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/15/reading-group-travels-with-my-aunt-greene |access-date=16 May 2022 |first=Sam |last=Jordison|work=[[The Guardian]] |date=15 June 2012 |language=en}}</ref> to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death.<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/><ref name="telly"/> In 1973, he had an uncredited [[cameo appearance]] as an insurance company representative in [[François Truffaut]]'s film ''[[Day for Night (film)|Day for Night]]''.<ref name="caterson"/> In 1981, Greene was awarded the [[Jerusalem Prize]], awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.<ref name="jbook"/><ref name="shipler">{{cite news| url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-protests.html | work=[[The New York Times]] | title=Israeli Book Fair Honors Greene, Amid Protests | first=David K. | last=Shipler | author-link=David K. Shipler | date=7 April 1981 | access-date=23 October 2024}}</ref> | ||
He lived the last years of his life in [[Corseaux]], on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, near [[Vevey]] where [[Charlie Chaplin]] was living in at this time. He visited Chaplin often, and the two were good friends.<ref name=Swissinfo>{{cite web |url=http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/extraordinary_exiles/Graham_Greene_finds_no_Swiss_cuckoo_clocks.html?cid=12832 |title=Graham Greene finds no Swiss cuckoo clocks |publisher=Swissinfo.ch |date=19 May 2006 |access-date=2 June 2010 |archive-date=22 February 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140222032103/http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/extraordinary_exiles/Graham_Greene_finds_no_Swiss_cuckoo_clocks.html?cid=12832 |url-status=dead }}</ref>{{sfn|Sherry|2004|p=783}} His book ''[[Doctor Fischer of Geneva|Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party]]'' (1980) | He lived the last years of his life in [[Corseaux]], on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, near [[Vevey]] where [[Charlie Chaplin]] was living in at this time. He visited Chaplin often, and the two were good friends.<ref name=Swissinfo>{{cite web |url=http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/extraordinary_exiles/Graham_Greene_finds_no_Swiss_cuckoo_clocks.html?cid=12832 |title=Graham Greene finds no Swiss cuckoo clocks |publisher=Swissinfo.ch |date=19 May 2006 |access-date=2 June 2010 |archive-date=22 February 2014 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140222032103/http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/specials/extraordinary_exiles/Graham_Greene_finds_no_Swiss_cuckoo_clocks.html?cid=12832 |url-status=dead }}</ref>{{sfn|Sherry|2004|p=783}} | ||
His book ''[[Doctor Fischer of Geneva|Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party]]'' (1980) deals with "the deadly sins of greed, pride, and despair."<ref>{{cite magazine |last=Towers |first=Robert |date=June 12, 1980 |title=Cautionary Tale |url=https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1980/06/12/cautionary-tale/ |magazine=The New York Review of Books |volume=27 |issue=10 |access-date=November 18, 2025}} | |||
</ref> | |||
He ceased going to mass and confession in the 1950s, but in his final years began to receive the sacraments again from Father Leopoldo Durán, a Spanish priest, who became a friend.{{sfn|Sherry|2004|pp=691, 695}} | |||
In one of his final works, a pamphlet titled ''J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice'' (1982), Greene wrote of a legal matter that embroiled him and his extended family in [[Nice]], and declared that organised crime flourished in Nice because the city's upper levels of civic government protected judicial and police corruption. The accusation provoked a [[libel]] lawsuit that Greene lost,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-riviera.html|title=On the Riviera, A Morality Tale by Graham Greene|first=Richard|last=Eder|author-link=Richard Eder|date=5 February 1982| | In one of his final works, a pamphlet titled ''J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice'' (1982), Greene wrote of a legal matter that embroiled him and his extended family in [[Nice]], and declared that organised crime flourished in Nice because the city's upper levels of civic government protected judicial and police corruption. The accusation provoked a [[libel]] lawsuit that Greene lost,<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-riviera.html|title=On the Riviera, A Morality Tale by Graham Greene|first=Richard|last=Eder|author-link=Richard Eder|date=5 February 1982|work=[[The New York Times]]}}</ref> but he was ultimately vindicated in the 1990s when the former mayor of Nice, [[Jacques Médecin]], was imprisoned for corruption and associated crimes.<ref>{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Homage paid to Graham Greene |first=Colin |last=Randall |work=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |issue=42231 |page=1}}</ref><ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/1998/11/19/world/jacques-medecin-70-dies-french-mayor.html | work=[[The New York Times]] | title=Jacques Medecin, 70, Dies; French Mayor | first=Craig R. | last=Whitney | date=19 November 1998 | access-date=23 August 2024}}</ref>{{sfn|Sherry|2004|pp=654-655}} | ||
In 1984, in celebration of his 80th birthday, the [[Greene King Brewery|brewery]] which Greene's great-grandfather founded in 1799 made a special edition of its St. Edmund's Ale for him, with a special label in his honour.<ref name=Vinocur030385>{{cite magazine |last=Vinocur |first=John |date=3 March 1985 |title=The Soul-Searching Continues for Graham Greene: The celebrated writer; whose new book is a long-forgotten novella [''The Tenth Man''], still dwells on doubt and failure |magazine=[[New York Times Magazine]] |location=New York }}</ref> 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 side of the problem is that I really don't want to survive myself [which] has nothing to do with nukes, but with the body hanging around while the mind departs."<ref name=Vinocur030385/> | In 1984, in celebration of his 80th birthday, the [[Greene King Brewery|brewery]] which Greene's great-grandfather founded in 1799 made a special edition of its St. Edmund's Ale for him, with a special label in his honour.<ref name=Vinocur030385>{{cite magazine |last=Vinocur |first=John |date=3 March 1985 |title=The Soul-Searching Continues for Graham Greene: The celebrated writer; whose new book is a long-forgotten novella [''The Tenth Man''], still dwells on doubt and failure |magazine=[[New York Times Magazine]] |location=New York }}</ref> 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 side of the problem is that I really don't want to survive myself [which] has nothing to do with nukes, but with the body hanging around while the mind departs."<ref name=Vinocur030385/> | ||
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== Writing style and themes == | == Writing style and themes == | ||
[[File:German book cover "Der stille Amerikaner" by Graham Greene, orig. "The Quiet American", 2nd edition 8 weeks after 1st edition, 1956.jpg|thumb|upright|Cover of the second German edition of ''The Quiet American'' (1956), claiming to be on sale only | [[File:German book cover "Der stille Amerikaner" by Graham Greene, orig. "The Quiet American", 2nd edition 8 weeks after 1st edition, 1956.jpg|thumb|upright|Cover of the second German edition of ''The Quiet American'' (1956), claiming to be on sale only eight weeks after the first edition, with the implication that the first is already sold out]] | ||
Beginning with ''[[Stamboul Train]]'' in 1932,<ref name="1974train" /><ref name="timesobit"/> Greene divided his fiction into two genres: [[thriller (genre)|thrillers]] ([[mystery (fiction)|mystery]] and [[suspense]] books), which he described as entertainments; and literary works, which he described as novels.<ref name="nytobit"/>{{sfn|Falk|2014|p=68}} As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between "entertainments" and "novels" to be less evident.<ref name="lambert"/><ref name="vqr"/><ref name="ratcliffe">{{Cite news |date=2 October 1980 |title=On the run in Greeneland |first=Michael |last=Ratcliffe |work=[[The Times]] |issue=60739 |page=12}}</ref> When the broadly comic ''[[Travels with My Aunt]]'' (1969) was published, the ''[[New York Times]]'' reviewer felt that it blurred the boundaries between the two: "''Travels With My Aunt'', the title page tells us, belongs to the 'novel' category, but reading the book very soon establishes that it is also extremely entertaining and often very funny."<ref>{{cite news |last=Boston |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Boston |date=25 January 1970 |title=Greene Being Funny About Greene and Serious About Life |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-aunt.html |access-date=16 June 2025 |work=[[The New York Times]]}}</ref> When [[Heinemann (publisher)|Heinemann]] and [[Bodley Head]] reissued Greene's "entertainment" ''[[The Confidential Agent]]'' and his "novel" ''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' together in 1971 as part of their ''Collected Edition'' of Greene's works, [[Julian Symons]] noted the "close relationship" between the genres;<ref>{{Cite news |date=16 May 1971 |title=Collected Greene |first=Julian |last=Symons |author-link=Julian Symons |work=[[The Sunday Times]] |issue=7719 |page=33}}</ref> as the edition progressed, [[Eric Ambler]] pointed out that Greene was redesignating all his "entertainments" as novels, adding "His reputation as a major twentieth-century novelist is likely to remain unimpaired."<ref>{{Cite news |date=30 November 1974 |title=A better sort of rubbish |first=Eric |last=Ambler |author-link=Eric Ambler |work=[[The Times]] |issue=59258 |page=8}}</ref> | Beginning with ''[[Stamboul Train]]'' in 1932,<ref name="1974train" /><ref name="timesobit"/> Greene divided his fiction into two genres: [[thriller (genre)|thrillers]] ([[mystery (fiction)|mystery]] and [[suspense]] books), which he described as entertainments; and literary works, which he described as novels.<ref name="nytobit"/>{{sfn|Falk|2014|p=68}} As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between "entertainments" and "novels" to be less evident.<ref name="lambert"/><ref name="vqr"/><ref name="ratcliffe">{{Cite news |date=2 October 1980 |title=On the run in Greeneland |first=Michael |last=Ratcliffe |work=[[The Times]] |issue=60739 |page=12}}</ref> When the broadly comic ''[[Travels with My Aunt]]'' (1969) was published, the ''[[New York Times]]'' reviewer felt that it blurred the boundaries between the two: "''Travels With My Aunt'', the title page tells us, belongs to the 'novel' category, but reading the book very soon establishes that it is also extremely entertaining and often very funny."<ref>{{cite news |last=Boston |first=Richard |author-link=Richard Boston |date=25 January 1970 |title=Greene Being Funny About Greene and Serious About Life |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/02/20/specials/greene-aunt.html |access-date=16 June 2025 |work=[[The New York Times]]}}</ref> When [[Heinemann (publisher)|Heinemann]] and [[Bodley Head]] reissued Greene's "entertainment" ''[[The Confidential Agent]]'' and his "novel" ''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' together in 1971 as part of their ''Collected Edition'' of Greene's works, [[Julian Symons]] noted the "close relationship" between the genres;<ref>{{Cite news |date=16 May 1971 |title=Collected Greene |first=Julian |last=Symons |author-link=Julian Symons |work=[[The Sunday Times]] |issue=7719 |page=33}}</ref> as the edition progressed, [[Eric Ambler]] pointed out that Greene was redesignating all his "entertainments" as novels, adding "His reputation as a major twentieth-century novelist is likely to remain unimpaired."<ref>{{Cite news |date=30 November 1974 |title=A better sort of rubbish |first=Eric |last=Ambler |author-link=Eric Ambler |work=[[The Times]] |issue=59258 |page=8}}</ref> | ||
Greene was one of the more "cinematic" of twentieth-century writers; most of his novels and many of his plays and short stories have been [[:Category:Films based on works by Graham Greene|adapted for film or television]].<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/><ref name="caterson">{{cite web |url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/451551/index.html |title=Greene, Graham (1904-1991) |first=John|last=Caterson |work=[[Screenonline]] |access-date=15 May 2024}}</ref> The 2014 edition of Quentin Falk's ''Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene'' lists 62 titles between 1933 and 2013 based on Greene material.{{sfn|Falk|2014}} Some novels were filmed more than once, such as ''[[Brighton Rock (novel)|Brighton Rock]]'' in 1947 and 2011,{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=145-151}} ''[[The End of the Affair]]'' in 1955 and 1999,{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=72-75, 136-139}} and ''[[The Quiet American]]'' in [[The Quiet American (1958 film)|1958]] and [[The Quiet American (2002 film)|2002]].{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=141-145}} The 1936 thriller ''[[A Gun for Sale]]'' was filmed three times in English alone, notably as ''[[This Gun for Hire]]'' in 1942.{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=10-15, 90-93, 168}} Greene received an [[Academy Award]] nomination for the screenplay for [[Carol Reed]]'s ''[[The Fallen Idol (film)|The Fallen Idol]]'' (1948),<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1950|title=The 22nd Academy Awards {{!}} 1950|website=oscars.org|date=3 October 2014 |language=en|access-date=2024-05-15}}</ref> adapted from his own short story ''The Basement Room''.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/459908/index.html |title=Fallen Idol, The (1948) |first=Sergio|last=Angelini |work=[[Screenonline]] |access-date=15 May 2024}}</ref> He also wrote several original screenplays.<ref name="timesobit"/> In 1949, after writing the novella as "raw material", he wrote the screenplay for a classic [[film noir]], ''[[The Third Man]]'', also directed by Reed and featuring [[Orson Welles]].<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/><ref name="telly">{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Obituary: Graham Greene |work=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |issue=42231 |page=21}}</ref> In 1983, ''[[The Honorary Consul]]'', published ten years earlier, was released as a [[The Honorary Consul (film)|film]] (under the title ''Beyond the Limit'' in some territories), starring [[Michael Caine]] and [[Richard Gere]].<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/30/movies/film-beyond-the-limit-from-graham-greene.html | work=[[The New York Times]] | title=Film: 'Beyond the Limit,' From Graham Greene | first=Vincent | last=Canby | author-link=Vincent Canby | date=30 September 1983 | access-date=13 September 2024}}</ref> Author and screenwriter [[Michael Korda]] contributed a foreword and introduction to this novel in a commemorative edition. | Greene was one of the more "cinematic" of twentieth-century writers; most of his novels and many of his plays and short stories have been [[:Category:Films based on works by Graham Greene|adapted for film or television]].<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/><ref name="caterson">{{cite web |url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/451551/index.html |title=Greene, Graham (1904-1991) |first=John|last=Caterson |work=[[Screenonline]] |access-date=15 May 2024}}</ref> The 2014 edition of Quentin Falk's ''Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene'' lists 62 titles between 1933 and 2013 based on Greene material.{{sfn|Falk|2014}} Some novels were filmed more than once, such as ''[[Brighton Rock (novel)|Brighton Rock]]'' in 1947 and 2011,{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=145-151}} ''[[The End of the Affair]]'' in 1955 and 1999,{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=72-75, 136-139}} and ''[[The Quiet American]]'' in [[The Quiet American (1958 film)|1958]] and [[The Quiet American (2002 film)|2002]].{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=141-145}} The 1936 thriller ''[[A Gun for Sale]]'' was filmed three times in English alone, notably as ''[[This Gun for Hire]]'' in 1942.{{sfn|Falk|2014|pp=10-15, 90-93, 168}} Greene received an [[Academy Award]] nomination for the screenplay for [[Carol Reed]]'s ''[[The Fallen Idol (film)|The Fallen Idol]]'' (1948),<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1950|title=The 22nd Academy Awards {{!}} 1950|website=oscars.org|date=3 October 2014 |language=en|access-date=2024-05-15}}</ref> adapted from his own short story ''The Basement Room''.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/459908/index.html |title=Fallen Idol, The (1948) |first=Sergio|last=Angelini |work=[[Screenonline]] |access-date=15 May 2024}}</ref> He also wrote several original screenplays.<ref name="timesobit"/> In 1949, after writing the novella as "raw material", he wrote the screenplay for a classic [[film noir]], ''[[The Third Man]]'', also directed by Reed and featuring [[Orson Welles]] and [[Joseph Cotten]].<ref name="oxforddnb.com"/><ref name="telly">{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Obituary: Graham Greene |work=[[The Daily Telegraph]] |issue=42231 |page=21}}</ref> In 1983, ''[[The Honorary Consul]]'', published ten years earlier, was released as a [[The Honorary Consul (film)|film]] (under the title ''Beyond the Limit'' in some territories), starring [[Michael Caine]] and [[Richard Gere]].<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/30/movies/film-beyond-the-limit-from-graham-greene.html | work=[[The New York Times]] | title=Film: 'Beyond the Limit,' From Graham Greene | first=Vincent | last=Canby | author-link=Vincent Canby | date=30 September 1983 | access-date=13 September 2024}}</ref> Author and screenwriter [[Michael Korda]] contributed a foreword and introduction to this novel in a commemorative edition. | ||
Greene's literary style was described by [[Evelyn Waugh]] in ''[[Commonweal (magazine)|Commonweal]]'' as "not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry and of independent life".<ref name="waugh"/> Commenting on the lean prose and its readability, Richard Jones wrote in the ''[[Virginia Quarterly Review]]'' that "nothing deflects Greene from the main business of holding the reader's attention".<ref name="vqr">{{cite web|url=http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1979/spring/jones-improbable-spy |title=The Improbable Spy |publisher=Vqronline.org |access-date=2 June 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081120100405/http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1979/spring/jones-improbable-spy/ |archive-date=20 November 2008 }}</ref> Greene's novels often have religious themes at their centre. In his literary criticism he attacked the [[Modernist literature|modernist]] writers [[Virginia Woolf]] and [[E. M. Forster]] for having lost the religious sense which, he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters, who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.angelfire.com/journal/ggbtps/FrstThing.htm |title=First Things |publisher=Angelfire.com |date=9 October 2004 |access-date=2 June 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091111034929/http://www.angelfire.com/journal/ggbtps/FrstThing.htm |archive-date=11 November 2009 }}</ref> Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul that carries the permanent consequence of salvation or damnation, and of the ultimate [[metaphysics|metaphysical]] realities of good and evil, sin and [[divine grace]], could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented 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 of evil.<ref name="Crisis">The Catholic Novels of Graham Greene | Greene's literary style was described by [[Evelyn Waugh]] in ''[[Commonweal (magazine)|Commonweal]]'' as "not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry and of independent life".<ref name="waugh"/> Commenting on the lean prose and its readability, Richard Jones wrote in the ''[[Virginia Quarterly Review]]'' that "nothing deflects Greene from the main business of holding the reader's attention".<ref name="vqr">{{cite web|url=http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1979/spring/jones-improbable-spy |title=The Improbable Spy |publisher=Vqronline.org |access-date=2 June 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081120100405/http://www.vqronline.org/articles/1979/spring/jones-improbable-spy/ |archive-date=20 November 2008 }}</ref> Greene's novels often have religious themes at their centre. In his literary criticism he attacked the [[Modernist literature|modernist]] writers [[Virginia Woolf]] and [[E. M. Forster]] for having lost the religious sense which, he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters, who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin".<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.angelfire.com/journal/ggbtps/FrstThing.htm |title=First Things |publisher=Angelfire.com |date=9 October 2004 |access-date=2 June 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091111034929/http://www.angelfire.com/journal/ggbtps/FrstThing.htm |archive-date=11 November 2009 }}</ref> Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul that carries the permanent consequence of salvation or damnation, and of the ultimate [[metaphysics|metaphysical]] realities of good and evil, sin and [[divine grace]], could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented 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 of evil.<ref name="Crisis">{{cite news| url=https://crisismagazine.com/vault/the-catholic-novels-of-graham-greene | work=Crisis | title=The Catholic Novels of Graham Greene | first=Edward| last=Short | date=1 April 2005 | access-date=8 August 2025}}</ref> Greene concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives—their mental, emotional, and spiritual depths. His stories are often set in poor, hot and dusty tropical places such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/AndrewPurssellArticle.htm |title=Regions of the Mind: The Exoticism of Greeneland |publisher=Dur.ac.uk |access-date=2 June 2010 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090418193302/http://www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/AndrewPurssellArticle.htm |archive-date=18 April 2009 }}</ref> | ||
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The novels often portray the dramatic struggles of the individual soul from a Catholic perspective.<ref name="thomson"/> Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction<ref name="thomson"/>—for example, the implication that Scobie in ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'', by deliberately causing his own damnation, sacrifices himself for others and thereby sanctifies his sins. His friend and fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of the [[Quietism (Christian philosophy)|Quietist]] heresy.{{sfn|Falk|2014|p=66}}<ref name="meyers"/><ref name="waugh">{{cite news| url=https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/felix-culpa | work=[[Commonweal (magazine)|Commonweal]] | title=Felix Culpa: On Graham Greene | first=Evelyn | last=Waugh | author-link=Evelyn Waugh | date=16 July 1948 | access-date=28 June 2025}}</ref> 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 novel was beyond his talents.{{cn|date=June 2025}} Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view by Edward Short is in ''Crisis Magazine'',<ref name="Crisis"/> and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by [[Joseph Pearce]].<ref name=Pearce/> | The novels often portray the dramatic struggles of the individual soul from a Catholic perspective.<ref name="thomson"/> Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction<ref name="thomson"/>—for example, the implication that Scobie in ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'', by deliberately causing his own damnation, sacrifices himself for others and thereby sanctifies his sins. His friend and fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of the [[Quietism (Christian philosophy)|Quietist]] heresy.{{sfn|Falk|2014|p=66}}<ref name="meyers"/><ref name="waugh">{{cite news| url=https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/felix-culpa | work=[[Commonweal (magazine)|Commonweal]] | title=Felix Culpa: On Graham Greene | first=Evelyn | last=Waugh | author-link=Evelyn Waugh | date=16 July 1948 | access-date=28 June 2025}}</ref> 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 novel was beyond his talents.{{cn|date=June 2025}} Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view by Edward Short is in ''[[Sophia Institute Press#Crisis magazine|Crisis Magazine]]'',<ref name="Crisis"/> and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by [[Joseph Pearce]].<ref name=Pearce/> | ||
Catholicism's prominence decreased in his later writings.{{sfn|Sinyard|2003|p=5}}{{efn|Asked in 1980 whether Fischer in ''[[Doctor Fischer of Geneva]]'' was evil, he replied, "The big Catholic verities like good and evil – you won't find these in my later work".<ref name="burgess"/>}} The supernatural preoccupations of the earlier work declined and were replaced by a [[humanism|humanistic]] perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching.<ref>{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Whisky priest of the novel: Daniel Johnson assesses Graham Greene, lifelong student of mankind's evil |first=Daniel |last=Johnson |author-link=Daniel Johnson (journalist) |work=[[The Times]] |issue=63983 |page=14}}</ref><ref name="thomson"/><ref name="meyers">{{cite web |last=Meyers |first=Jeffrey |author-link=Jeffrey Meyers |date=29 May 2024 |title=The odd couple: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene may have been unlike as possible, but they remained the closest of friends for four decades |url=https://thecritic.co.uk/the-odd-couple/ |access-date=18 June 2025 |work=[[The Critic (modern magazine)|The Critic]]}}</ref> | Catholicism's prominence decreased in his later writings.{{sfn|Sinyard|2003|p=5}}{{efn|Asked in 1980 whether Fischer in ''[[Doctor Fischer of Geneva]]'' was evil, he replied, "The big Catholic verities like good and evil – you won't find these in my later work".<ref name="burgess"/>}} The supernatural preoccupations of the earlier work declined and were replaced by a [[humanism|humanistic]] perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching.<ref>{{Cite news |date=4 April 1991 |title=Whisky priest of the novel: Daniel Johnson assesses Graham Greene, lifelong student of mankind's evil |first=Daniel |last=Johnson |author-link=Daniel Johnson (journalist) |work=[[The Times]] |issue=63983 |page=14}}</ref><ref name="thomson"/><ref name="meyers">{{cite web |last=Meyers |first=Jeffrey |author-link=Jeffrey Meyers |date=29 May 2024 |title=The odd couple: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene may have been unlike as possible, but they remained the closest of friends for four decades |url=https://thecritic.co.uk/the-odd-couple/ |access-date=18 June 2025 |work=[[The Critic (modern magazine)|The Critic]]}}</ref> | ||
In his later years, Greene was a strong critic of [[American imperialism]] and sympathised with the Cuban leader [[Fidel Castro]], whom he had met.<ref name="Kirjasto">{{cite web|url=http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/greene.htm |title=Graham Greene |website=Books and Writers |first=Petri |last=Liukkonen |publisher=[[Kuusankoski]] Public Library |location=Finland |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050727074735/http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/greene.htm |archive-date=27 July 2005 |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref name="lebrecht">{{Cite news |date=1 April 1984 |title=The Greene Factor |first=Norman |last=Lebrecht |author-link=Norman Lebrecht |work=[[The Sunday Times]] |issue=8330 |pages=33–34}}</ref><ref name="timesobit"/> Years before the [[Vietnam War]], he prophetically attacked the idealistic but arrogant beliefs of ''[[The Quiet American]]'', whose certainty in his own virtue kept him from seeing the disaster he inflicted on the Vietnamese.<ref>For Greene's views on politics, see also {{cite journal |first=Anthony |last=Burgess |author-link=Anthony Burgess |title=Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene |journal=Journal of Contemporary History |volume=2 |issue=2 |year=1967 |pages=93–99 |doi=10.1177/002200946700200208 |s2cid=153416421 }}</ref><ref name="timesobit"/><ref>{{cite news |last=Whitney |first=Joel |date=15 June 2022 |title=Our Man in Hollywood: A tangled tale from the culture wars of the 1950s |url=https://thebaffler.com/latest/our-man-in-hollywood-whitney |access-date=5 June 2025 |work=[[The Baffler]]}}</ref> In ''[[Ways of Escape]]'', reflecting on a Mexican trip, he criticised Mexico's government for "making a hypocritical pretence of supporting Cuba" while simultaneously feeding intelligence on visitors to the American authorities.{{sfn|Greene|1981|pp=63-64}} In the 1930s he was already praising [[Ignazio Silone]] for his attempt to reconcile the social messages of Catholicism and Marxism;<ref name="thomson"/> in Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows".<ref name="P.xii of John Updike">P.xii of John Updike's introduction to ''The Power and the Glory'' New York: Viking, 1990.</ref> | In his later years, Greene was a strong critic of [[American imperialism]] and sympathised with the Cuban leader [[Fidel Castro]], whom he had met.<ref name="Kirjasto">{{cite web|url=http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/greene.htm |title=Graham Greene |website=Books and Writers |first=Petri |last=Liukkonen |publisher=[[Kuusankoski]] Public Library |location=Finland |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20050727074735/http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/greene.htm |archive-date=27 July 2005 |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref name="lebrecht">{{Cite news |date=1 April 1984 |title=The Greene Factor |first=Norman |last=Lebrecht |author-link=Norman Lebrecht |work=[[The Sunday Times]] |issue=8330 |pages=33–34}}</ref><ref name="timesobit"/> Years before the [[Vietnam War]], he prophetically attacked the idealistic but arrogant beliefs of ''[[The Quiet American]]'', whose certainty in his own virtue kept him from seeing the disaster he inflicted on the Vietnamese.<ref>For Greene's views on politics, see also {{cite journal |first=Anthony |last=Burgess |author-link=Anthony Burgess |title=Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene |journal=Journal of Contemporary History |volume=2 |issue=2 |year=1967 |pages=93–99 |doi=10.1177/002200946700200208 |s2cid=153416421 }}</ref><ref name="timesobit"/><ref>{{cite news |last=Whitney |first=Joel |date=15 June 2022 |title=Our Man in Hollywood: A tangled tale from the culture wars of the 1950s |url=https://thebaffler.com/latest/our-man-in-hollywood-whitney |access-date=5 June 2025 |work=[[The Baffler]]}}</ref> In ''[[Ways of Escape]]'', reflecting on a Mexican trip, he criticised Mexico's government for "making a hypocritical pretence of supporting Cuba" while simultaneously feeding intelligence on visitors to the American authorities.{{sfn|Greene|1981|pp=63-64}} In the 1930s he was already praising [[Ignazio Silone]] for his attempt to reconcile the social messages of Catholicism and Marxism;<ref name="thomson"/> in Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows".<ref name="P.xii of John Updike">P.xii of John Updike's introduction to ''The Power and the Glory'' New York: Viking, 1990.</ref><ref>{{cite book |author-last=Greene |author-first=Graham |year=1970 |orig-date=1st pub. [[Bodley Head]] 1969 |title=Collected Essays |location=London |url=https://archive.org/details/collectedessays0000gree |url-access=registration |publisher=[[Penguin Books]] |page=262 |isbn=0-14-018576-3 }}</ref> | ||
{{cquote|In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.|||Graham Greene}} | {{cquote|In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.|||Graham Greene}} | ||
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== Legacy == | == Legacy == | ||
[[File:GRAHAM GREENE 1904 - 1991 Writer lived here 1935 - 1940.jpg|thumb|upright|Blue plaque erected in 2011 by English Heritage at 14 Clapham Common North Side, Clapham, London]] | [[File:GRAHAM GREENE 1904 - 1991 Writer lived here 1935 - 1940.jpg|thumb|upright|Blue plaque erected in 2011 by English Heritage at 14 Clapham Common North Side, Clapham, London]] | ||
Greene is regarded as a major 20th-century [[novelist]],{{sfn|Diemert|1996|pp=5, 183}} and was praised by [[John Irving]], before Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language".<ref name=Irving>[[John Irving|Irving, John]]. ''The Imaginary Girlfriend''. New York, [[Ballantine Books]], 2002, p. 31.</ref> Novelist [[Frederick Buechner]] called Greene's novel ''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' a "tremendous influence".<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/offictionfaithtw00brow|title=Of fiction and faith : twelve American writers talk about their vision and work|first=W. Dale|last=Brown|date=1997|publisher=W.B. Eerdmans|isbn=0802843131|location=Grand Rapids, Mich.|oclc=36994237}}</ref> By 1943, Greene had acquired the reputation of being the "leading English male novelist of his generation",{{sfn|Diemert|1996|p=179}} and at the time of his death in 1991 had a reputation as a writer of both deeply serious novels on the theme of Catholicism,<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/03/biography.grahamgreene|title=More Sherry trifles|first=Ian |last=Thomson|newspaper=The Observer|date=3 October 2004 }}</ref> and of "suspense-filled stories of detection".<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_G2mAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA23|page=23|title=Graham Greene: The Major Novels|first=Lynette|last= Kohn|publisher=Stanford University Press|date= 1961}}</ref> | Greene is regarded as a major 20th-century [[novelist]],{{sfn|Diemert|1996|pp=5, 183}} and was praised by [[John Irving]], before Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language".<ref name=Irving>[[John Irving|Irving, John]]. ''The Imaginary Girlfriend''. New York, [[Ballantine Books]], 2002, p. 31.</ref> Novelist [[Frederick Buechner]] called Greene's novel ''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' a "tremendous influence".<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/offictionfaithtw00brow|title=Of fiction and faith : twelve American writers talk about their vision and work|first=W. Dale|last=Brown|date=1997|publisher=W.B. Eerdmans|isbn=0802843131|location=Grand Rapids, Mich.|oclc=36994237}}</ref> By 1943, Greene had acquired the reputation of being the "leading English male novelist of his generation",{{sfn|Diemert|1996|p=179}} and at the time of his death in 1991 had a reputation as a writer of both deeply serious novels on the theme of Catholicism,<ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/oct/03/biography.grahamgreene|title=More Sherry trifles|first=Ian |last=Thomson|newspaper=The Observer|date=3 October 2004 }}</ref> and of "suspense-filled stories of detection".<ref>{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_G2mAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA23|page=23|title=Graham Greene: The Major Novels|first=Lynette|last= Kohn|publisher=Stanford University Press|date= 1961}}</ref> | ||
Greene collected several literary awards for his novels, including the 1941 [[Hawthornden Prize]] for ''[[The Power and the Glory]]''<ref name="timesobit"/><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.hawthornden.org/hawthornden-prize|title=Previous winners of the Hawthornden Prize|website=hawthornden.org|access-date=2024-05-15}}</ref> and the 1948 [[James Tait Black Memorial Prize]] for ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.ed.ac.uk/events/james-tait-black/winners/fiction|title=The James Tait Black Prizes {{!}} Fiction Winners|website=ed.ac.uk|date=26 July 2023 |access-date=2024-05-16}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |date=25 January 1949 |title=Book Prizes Awarded |work=[[The Times]] |issue=51288 |page=2}}</ref> As an author, he received the 1968 [[Shakespeare Prize]]{{sfn|Sherry|2004|p=483}} and the 1981 [[Jerusalem Prize]], a biennial literary award given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society.<ref name="jbook">{{cite web|url=https://www.jbookforum.com/jerusalem-prize-previous-winners/|title=The Jerusalem Prize {{!}} Previous Winners|website=jbookforum.com|access-date=2024-08-20}}</ref><ref name="shipler"/> In 1986, he was awarded Britain's [[Order of Merit]].<ref name="timesobit"/> | Greene collected several literary awards for his novels, including the 1941 [[Hawthornden Prize]] for ''[[The Power and the Glory]]''<ref name="timesobit"/><ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.hawthornden.org/hawthornden-prize|title=Previous winners of the Hawthornden Prize|website=hawthornden.org|access-date=2024-05-15}}</ref> and the 1948 [[James Tait Black Memorial Prize]] for ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.ed.ac.uk/events/james-tait-black/winners/fiction|title=The James Tait Black Prizes {{!}} Fiction Winners|website=ed.ac.uk|date=26 July 2023 |access-date=2024-05-16}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |date=25 January 1949 |title=Book Prizes Awarded |work=[[The Times]] |issue=51288 |page=2}}</ref> As an author, he received the 1968 [[Shakespeare Prize]]{{sfn|Sherry|2004|p=483}} and the 1981 [[Jerusalem Prize]], a biennial literary award given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society.<ref name="jbook">{{cite web|url=https://www.jbookforum.com/jerusalem-prize-previous-winners/|title=The Jerusalem Prize {{!}} Previous Winners|website=jbookforum.com|access-date=2024-08-20}}</ref><ref name="shipler"/> In 1986, he was awarded Britain's [[Order of Merit]].<ref name="timesobit"/> | ||
The Graham Greene International Festival is an annual four-day event of conference papers, informal talks, question and answer sessions, films, dramatised readings, music, creative writing workshops and social events. It is organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and takes place in the writer's home town of Berkhamsted (about 35 miles north-west of London), on dates as close as possible to the anniversary of his birth (2 October). Its purpose is to promote interest in and study of the works of Graham Greene.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.grahamgreenefestival.org/|title=Home|work=Graham Greene|access-date=11 March 2016}}</ref> | The Graham Greene International Festival is an annual four-day event of conference papers, informal talks, question and answer sessions, films, dramatised readings, music, creative writing workshops and social events. It is organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and takes place in the writer's home town of Berkhamsted (about 35 miles north-west of London), on dates as close as possible to the anniversary of his birth (2 October). Its purpose is to promote interest in and study of the works of Graham Greene.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.grahamgreenefestival.org/|title=Home|work=Graham Greene|access-date=11 March 2016|archive-date=10 September 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130910125614/http://www.grahamgreenefestival.org/|url-status=dead}}</ref> | ||
He is the subject of the 2013 documentary film, ''[[Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene]]''.<ref name="Jones">{{cite news|url=http://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/screens/2013-04-30/dvd-watch-dangerous-edge-a-life-of-graham-greene/|title=DVD Watch: 'Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene'|last=Jones|first=Kimberley|date=30 April 2013|work=Austin Chronicle|access-date=24 October 2014}}</ref> His 1987 trip to Moscow to visit Kim Philby is the subject of [[Ben Brown (playwright)|Ben Brown]]'s play ''A Splinter of Ice'' (first staged 2021 and filmed that year); [[Oliver Ford Davies]] originally played Greene.<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/apr/15/a-splinter-of-ice-review-kim-philby-graham-greene-soviet-spy | work=[[The Guardian]] | title=Graham | He is the subject of the 2013 documentary film, ''[[Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene]]''.<ref name="Jones">{{cite news|url=http://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/screens/2013-04-30/dvd-watch-dangerous-edge-a-life-of-graham-greene/|title=DVD Watch: 'Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene'|last=Jones|first=Kimberley|date=30 April 2013|work=Austin Chronicle|access-date=24 October 2014}}</ref> His 1987 trip to Moscow to visit Kim Philby is the subject of [[Ben Brown (playwright)|Ben Brown]]'s play ''A Splinter of Ice'' (first staged 2021 and filmed that year); [[Oliver Ford Davies]] originally played Greene.<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/apr/15/a-splinter-of-ice-review-kim-philby-graham-greene-soviet-spy | work=[[The Guardian]] | title=Graham Greene's showdown with Soviet spy Kim Philby: A Splinter of Ice review | first=Arifa | last=Akbar | date=15 April 2021 | access-date=7 June 2025}}</ref><ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/apr/25/a-splinter-of-ice-review-ben-brown-graham-greene-kim-philby | work=[[The Guardian]] | title=A Splinter of Ice review – Graham Greene and Kim Philby clink glasses | first=Susannah | last=Clapp | author-link=Susannah Clapp | date=25 April 2021 | access-date=7 June 2025}}</ref> Greene also features as a character in the film ''The Honourable Rebel'' (2015) about [[Elizabeth Varley|Elizabeth Montagu]] who worked with him on the script of ''The Third Man''.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.beaulieu.co.uk/news/story-of-elizabeth-montagu-to-play-at-uk-cinemas/|title=Story of Elizabeth Montagu to Play at UK Cinemas|website=beaulieu.co.uk|date=24 November 2015 |access-date=2025-06-21}}</ref><ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/jul/10/books.guardianreview10 | work=[[The Guardian]] | title=Harry in the shadow | first=Kate | last=Connolly | date=10 July 1999 | access-date=20 June 2025}}</ref> In the 2001 film ''[[Donnie Darko]]'', the protagonist is inspired by a classroom discussion of Greene's short story "[[The Destructors]]" and its line "destruction after all is a form of creation".<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/oct/27/philipfrench | work=[[The Guardian]] | title=Into the heart of Darko | first=Philip | last=French | author-link=Philip French | date=27 October 2002 | access-date=15 May 2024}}</ref> | ||
== Selected works == | == Selected works == | ||
{{Main|Graham Greene bibliography}} | {{Main|Graham Greene bibliography}} | ||
{{Div col}} | {{Div col}} | ||
* ''[[The Man Within]]'' (debut | * ''[[The Man Within]]'' (debut; 1929) | ||
* ''[[Stamboul Train]]'' (1932 | * ''[[Stamboul Train]]'' (1932; also published as ''Orient Express'' in the US) | ||
* ''[[It's a Battlefield]]'' (1934) | * ''[[It's a Battlefield]]'' (1934) | ||
* ''[[England Made Me (novel)|England Made Me]]'' (also published as ''The Shipwrecked'' | * ''[[England Made Me (novel)|England Made Me]]'' (also published as ''The Shipwrecked''; 1935) | ||
* ''[[A Gun for Sale]]'' (1936) | * ''[[A Gun for Sale]]'' (1936) | ||
* ''[[Journey Without Maps]]'' (1936) | * ''[[Journey Without Maps]]'' (1936) | ||
* ''[[Brighton Rock (novel)|Brighton Rock]]'' (1938) | * ''[[Brighton Rock (novel)|Brighton Rock]]'' (1938) | ||
* ''[[The Lawless Roads]]'' (1939 | * ''[[The Lawless Roads]]'' (1939; also published as ''Another Mexico'' in the US) | ||
* ''[[The Confidential Agent]]'' (1939) | * ''[[The Confidential Agent]]'' (1939) | ||
* ''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' (1940) | * ''[[The Power and the Glory]]'' (1940) | ||
* ''[[The Ministry of Fear]]'' (1943) | * ''[[The Ministry of Fear]]'' (1943) | ||
* ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'' (1948) | * ''[[The Heart of the Matter]]'' (1948) | ||
* ''[[The Third Man (novel)|The Third Man]]'' (1950 | * ''[[The Third Man (novel)|The Third Man]]'' (1950; novella written in 1948 as a preliminary to Greene's screenplay for the film ''The Third Man'') | ||
* ''[[The End of the Affair]]'' (1951) | * ''[[The End of the Affair]]'' (1951) | ||
* ''[[Twenty-One Stories]]'' (1954 | * ''[[Twenty-One Stories]]'' (1954; short stories) | ||
* ''[[Loser Takes All]]'' (1955) | * ''[[Loser Takes All]]'' (1955) | ||
* ''[[The Quiet American]]'' (1955) | * ''[[The Quiet American]]'' (1955) | ||
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* ''[[The Tenth Man (novel)|The Tenth Man]]'' (1985) | * ''[[The Tenth Man (novel)|The Tenth Man]]'' (1985) | ||
* ''[[The Captain and the Enemy]]'' (1988) | * ''[[The Captain and the Enemy]]'' (1988) | ||
* ''[[The Last Word (Greene short story)|The Last Word]]'' (1990 | * ''[[The Last Word (Greene short story)|The Last Word]]'' (1990; short stories) | ||
{{Div col end}} | {{Div col end}} | ||
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== Further reading == | == Further reading == | ||
{{ | {{Refbegin|40em}} | ||
* [http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/ggs/ Graham Greene Studies] (journal), [[University of North Georgia]] - [[Digital Commons]], [[bepress]], [[Elsevier]] | * ''[http://digitalcommons.northgeorgia.edu/ggs/ Graham Greene Studies]'' (journal), [[University of North Georgia]] - [[Digital Commons]], [[bepress]], [[Elsevier]] | ||
* Allain, Marie-Françoise, 1983. ''The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene''. Bodley Head. | * Allain, Marie-Françoise, 1983. ''The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene''. Bodley Head. | ||
* [[Bernard Bergonzi|Bergonzi, Bernard]], 2006. ''A Study in Greene: Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel''. Oxford University Press. | * [[Bernard Bergonzi|Bergonzi, Bernard]], 2006. ''A Study in Greene: Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel''. Oxford University Press. | ||
* Cloetta, Yvonne, 2004. ''In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene'', translated by Euan Cameron. Bloomsbury. | * Cloetta, Yvonne, 2004. ''In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene'', translated by Euan Cameron. Bloomsbury. | ||
* [[Duncan Fallowell|Fallowell, Duncan]], ''20th Century Characters'', Loaded: Graham Greene at home in Antibes (London, Vintage Books, 1994) | * [[Duncan Fallowell|Fallowell, Duncan]], ''20th Century Characters'', Loaded: Graham Greene at home in Antibes (London, Vintage Books, 1994) | ||
* [[Paul Fussell|Fussell, Paul]] (1980). "Graham Greene's Parallel Journey", in ''Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars''. Oxford University Press, pp. 65-70. | |||
* Greene, Richard, editor, 2007. ''Graham Greene: A Life in Letters''. Knopf Canada. | * Greene, Richard, editor, 2007. ''Graham Greene: A Life in Letters''. Knopf Canada. | ||
* [[Shirley Hazzard|Hazzard, Shirley]], 2000. ''Greene on Capri''. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. | * [[Shirley Hazzard|Hazzard, Shirley]], 2000. ''Greene on Capri''. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. | ||
| Line 243: | Line 277: | ||
* [[Michael Shelden|Shelden, Michael]], 1994. ''Graham Greene: The Enemy Within''. William Heinemann. Random House ed., 1995, {{ISBN|0-679-42883-6}} | * [[Michael Shelden|Shelden, Michael]], 1994. ''Graham Greene: The Enemy Within''. William Heinemann. Random House ed., 1995, {{ISBN|0-679-42883-6}} | ||
* Simon Raven & Martin Shuttleworth {{cite journal| url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5180/the-art-of-fiction-no-3-graham-greene| title=Graham Greene Interviewed, The Art of Fiction No. 3| journal=The Paris Review| date=Autumn 1953 | volume=Autumn 1953| issue=3}} | * Simon Raven & Martin Shuttleworth {{cite journal| url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5180/the-art-of-fiction-no-3-graham-greene| title=Graham Greene Interviewed, The Art of Fiction No. 3| journal=The Paris Review| date=Autumn 1953 | volume=Autumn 1953| issue=3}} | ||
*{{cite book |last=West |first=William John |title=The quest for Graham Greene |date=1998 |publisher=St. Martin's Press |location=New York |isbn=978-0-312-18161-1 |edition=1st US }} | * Valentinitsch, Bernhard. "Graham Greenes Roman 'The Human Factor' (1978) und Otto Premingers gleichnamige Verfilmung (1979)". In: ''JIPSS'' (''Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies''), No. 14. Graz 2021, p. 34-56. | ||
* {{cite book |last=West |first=William John |title=The quest for Graham Greene |date=1998 |publisher=St. Martin's Press |location=New York |isbn=978-0-312-18161-1 |edition=1st US }} | |||
{{refend}} | {{refend}} | ||
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{{Commons category|Graham Greene (writer)}} | {{Commons category|Graham Greene (writer)}} | ||
{{Wikiquote}} | {{Wikiquote}} | ||
;Digital collections | ; Digital collections | ||
* {{StandardEbooks|Standard Ebooks URL=https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/graham-greene}} | * {{StandardEbooks|Standard Ebooks URL=https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/graham-greene}} | ||
* {{Internet Archive author |sname=Graham Greene}} | * {{Internet Archive author |sname=Graham Greene}} | ||
* {{Librivox author |id=8311}} | * {{Librivox author |id=8311}} | ||
;Physical collections | ; Physical collections | ||
* [https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadID=00200 Graham Greene Papers] at the [[Harry Ransom Center]] | * [https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadID=00200 Graham Greene Papers] at the [[Harry Ransom Center]] | ||
* [https://library.bc.edu/finding-aids/MS1995-003-finding-aid.pdf Graham Greene Papers] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221205074354/https://library.bc.edu/finding-aids/MS1995-003-finding-aid.pdf |date=5 December 2022 }} at John J. Burns Library, [[Boston College]] | * [https://library.bc.edu/finding-aids/MS1995-003-finding-aid.pdf Graham Greene Papers]; {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20221205074354/https://library.bc.edu/finding-aids/MS1995-003-finding-aid.pdf |date=5 December 2022 }} at John J. Burns Library, [[Boston College]] | ||
* [https://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/greenegraham788/ Graham Greene Collection] at [[Emory University]] | * [https://findingaids.library.emory.edu/documents/greenegraham788/ Graham Greene Collection] at [[Emory University]] | ||
* [https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_4079892 Graham Greene Letters] at [[Columbia University]] | * [https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_4079892 Graham Greene Letters] at [[Columbia University]] | ||
* [https://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=IAMS_VU2&search_scope=default_scope&docId=IAMS032-003409982&fn=permalink Bryan Forbes Collection of Graham Greene] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220920170404/https://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=IAMS_VU2&search_scope=default_scope&docId=IAMS032-003409982&fn=permalink |date=20 September 2022 }} at the [[British Library]] | * [https://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=IAMS_VU2&search_scope=default_scope&docId=IAMS032-003409982&fn=permalink Bryan Forbes Collection of Graham Greene]; {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220920170404/https://searcharchives.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/dlDisplay.do?vid=IAMS_VU2&search_scope=default_scope&docId=IAMS032-003409982&fn=permalink |date=20 September 2022 }} at the [[British Library]] | ||
* [http://archives.balliol.ox.ac.uk/Modern%20Papers/GreeneReid/greenereid10.asp The Cherry Record Collection of Josephine Reid's Papers and Books Relating to Graham Greene] at [[Balliol College]] Archives & Manuscripts | * [http://archives.balliol.ox.ac.uk/Modern%20Papers/GreeneReid/greenereid10.asp The Cherry Record Collection of Josephine Reid's Papers and Books Relating to Graham Greene] at [[Balliol College]] Archives & Manuscripts | ||
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[[Category:English Roman Catholic writers]] | [[Category:English Roman Catholic writers]] | ||
[[Category:English Roman Catholics]] | [[Category:English Roman Catholics]] | ||
[[Category:English spy fiction writers]] | [[Category:English spy fiction writers]] | ||
[[Category:English travel writers]] | [[Category:English travel writers]] | ||
Latest revision as of 06:04, 18 November 2025
Template:Short description Script error: No such module "Other people". Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Script error: No such module "Infobox".Template:Template otherScript error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".Template:Main other
Henry Graham Greene Template:Postnominals (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
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" as he termed them). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times.[1][2][3] Through 67 years of writing, which included over 25 novels, he explored the conflicting moral and political issues of the modern world. The Power and the Glory won the 1941 Hawthornden Prize and The Heart of the Matter won the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Best of the James Tait Black. Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 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.[4] Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic".[5] He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia,[6] and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland.[7] William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".[8] V. S. Pritchett called him "The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings and who understands the tragic and comic ironies of love, loyalty and belief."[9]
Early years (1904–1922)
Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St John's House, a boarding house of Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, where his father was house master.[10] He was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, Hugh, became Director-General of the BBC,[11] and his elder brother, Raymond, an eminent physician and mountaineer.[12]
His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were first cousins, both members of a large, influential family that included the owners of Greene King Brewery, bankers, and statesmen;Template:Sfn his grandmother Jane Wilson was first cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson.[11]
Charles Greene was second master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry, who was married to Charles' cousin.Template:Sfn Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during World War II.[13]
In his childhood, Greene spent his summers at Harston House, the Cambridgeshire home of his uncle, Sir Graham Greene.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In Greene's description of his childhood, he describes his learning to read there: "It was at Harston I quite suddenly found that I could read—the book was Dixon Brett, Detective. I didn't want anyone to know of my discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Ballantyne's Coral Island for the train journey home—always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley..."Template:Sfn
In 1910, Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as 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 roulette and by taking aspirin before going swimming in the school pool. In 1920, aged 16, in what was a radical step for the time,[14] he was sent for psychoanalysis for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day student.Template:Sfn School friends included the journalist Claud Cockburn and the historian Peter Quennell.Template:Sfn
Greene contributed several stories to the school magazine,Template:Sfn one of which was published by a London evening newspaperTemplate:Sfn[12] in January 1921.
Oxford University
He attended Balliol College, Oxford, to study history. During 1922 Greene was for a short time a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and sought an invitation to the new Soviet Union, of which nothing came.[15] In 1925, while he was an undergraduate at Balliol, his first work, a poorly received volume of poetry titled Babbling April, was published.[15]
Greene had periodic bouts of depression while at Oxford, and largely kept to himself.[11] Of 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 of our revelry."[11] He graduated in 1925 with a second-class degree.[15]
Writing career
After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the Nottingham Journal,[16][12] and then as a sub-editor on The Times.[11] While he was still at Oxford, he had started corresponding with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine.[11][17]Template:Sfn Greene was an agnostic, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in his autobiography A Sort of Life, he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held".Template:Sfn Greene was baptised on 28 February 1926Template:Sfn and they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London.Template:Sfn
The Man Within (1929) was Greene's first published novel;Template:Efn after its favourable reception he left his job at The Times to work full-time as a novelist.[18][11] The next two books, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932), were unsuccessful, however,[11] and he later disowned them.[12]Template:Efn His first true success was Stamboul Train (1932) which was taken on by the Book SocietyTemplate:Sfn and adapted as the film Orient Express, in 1934.[19]
Although Greene objected to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic,Template:Efn Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, and The End of the Affair,[6] which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel.[20] 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 in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage. In the early 1930s Greene moved to the left politically. He read left-wing writers like G.D.H. Cole and John Strachey; in 1933 he joined the Independent Labour Party. This move to the left is reflected in the characters and plot of his fifth novel It's A Battlefield.Template:Sfn His later political affiliations and convictions were more ambiguous.Template:Sfn
He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day.Template:Sfn[21] His collected film reviews were later published as The Pleasure Dome (1972).[22] Greene's 1937 film review[23] of Wee Willie Winkie, for Night and Day—which said that the nine-year-old star, Shirley Temple, displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen"Template:Sfn—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs,[24][25] and Greene left the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over.[26][27] While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory.[26][12]
By the 1950s, Greene had become known as one of the finest writers of his generation.[28][29]
Greene also wrote short stories and plays,[30] which were well received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist.[31] His first successful play, The Living Room, debuted in 1952.[12]
Michael Korda, a lifelong friend and later his editor at Simon & Schuster, observed Greene at work: Greene wrote in a small black leather notebook with a black fountain pen and would write approximately 500 words. Korda described this as Graham's daily penance—once he finished he put the notebook away for the rest of the day.[32][33]
His writing influences included Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, Charles Péguy and John Buchan.[34][35]Template:Sfn
Travel and espionage
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.[30][36][37] Greene himself responded to commentators who called the world of his fiction an imaginary place:
Throughout his life, Greene travelled to what he called the world's wild and remote places. In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited into MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War.[38] Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6.[39][40] Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944.[41] He later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War.[42] Greene also corresponded with intelligence officer and spy, John Cairncross, for forty years and that correspondence is held by the John J. Burns Library, at Boston College.[43]
Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip to Liberia that produced the travel book Journey Without Maps.[44] His 1938 trip to Mexico to see the 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.[21] That voyage produced two books, the nonfiction The Lawless Roads (published as Another Mexico in the US) and the novel The Power and the Glory. In 1953, the Holy Office informed Greene that The Power and the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism.[45]
In 1950 his brother, Hugh Carleton Greene who was head of UK Information Services in Malaya, brought Greene to Malaya during the early phase of the Malayan Emergency.[46]Greene returned to England via Indo-China in 1951 to visit his friend, Trevor Wilson, British consul in Hanoi. There he met General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, French high commissioner and commander-in-chief of the French Expeditionary Corps. Greene returned several times and wrote newspaper articles[47] [48] and developed the book, The Quiet American.
In 1954, Greene travelled to Haiti,[49] where The Comedians (1966) is set,[50] and which was then under the rule of dictator François Duvalier, known as "Papa Doc", frequently staying at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince.[51] He visited Haiti again in the late 1950s. As inspiration for his novel A Burnt-Out Case (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of leper colonies in the Congo Basin and in what were then the British Cameroons.[52] During this trip in late February and early March 1959, Greene met several times with Andrée de Jongh, a leader in the Belgian resistance during WWII, who famously established an escape route to Gibraltar through the Pyrenees for downed allied airmen.[53]
In 1957, just months after Fidel Castro began his final revolutionary assault on the Batista regime in 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.[54] Castro, like Daniel Ortega and Omar Torrijos, was one of several Latin American leaders Greene's friendship with whom has led some commentators to question his commitment to democracy.[11][55][36] After one visit Castro gave Greene a painting he had done, which hung in the living room of the French house where the author spent the last years of his life.[54] Greene did later 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 idealistic, probably betray themselves in time."[54]
Publishing career
Between 1944 and 1948, Greene was director at Eyre & Spottiswoode under chairman Douglas Jerrold, in charge of developing its fiction list.[56][12] Greene created The Century Library series, which was discontinued after he left following a conflict with Jerrold regarding Anthony Powell's contract. In 1958, Greene was offered the position of chairman by Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre, but declined.Template:Sfn
He was a director at The Bodley Head from 1957 to 1968 under Max Reinhardt.[57] He used his influence to stop the firm putting his own novels forward for the Booker Prize, which he felt should go to younger writers, and to champion Richard Power, whose The Hungry Grass he persuaded Bodley to nominate for a posthumous Booker.[58]
Personal life
Greene was an agnostic, but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 after meeting his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning.[4] They were married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, north London.[11] The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline Bourget Greene (born 1933) and Francis Greene (born 1936), who was his father's literary executor.[11]
In his discussions with Father George Trollope,[59] the priest to whom he went for instruction in Catholicism, Greene argued with the cleric "on the ground of dogmatic atheism", as Greene's primary difficulty with religion was what he termed the "if" surrounding God's existence. He found, however, that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming less and less improbable",[60] and Greene converted and was baptised after vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defended atheism, or at least the "if" of agnosticism.[61] Late in life, Greene called himself a "Catholic agnostic".[5]
Beginning in 1946, Greene had an affair with Catherine Walston, the wife of Henry Walston, a wealthy farmer and future life peer.[62] That relationship is generally thought to have informed the writing of The End of the Affair, published in 1951, when the relationship came to an end.[63][64]
Greene left his family in 1947,Template:Sfn but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching,Template:Sfn and they remained married until Greene's death in 1991.[65][66]
Greene lived with manic depression (bipolar disorder).Template:Sfn[67] He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life.[68] In a letter to his wife, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".[69]
Final years
Greene left Britain in 1966, moving to Antibes,[70] to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death.[11][17] In 1973, he had an uncredited cameo appearance as an insurance company representative in François Truffaut's film Day for Night.[71] In 1981, Greene was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.[72][73]
He lived the last years of his life in Corseaux, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, near Vevey where Charlie Chaplin was living in at this time. He visited Chaplin often, and the two were good friends.[7]Template:Sfn
His book Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980) deals with "the deadly sins of greed, pride, and despair."[74]
He ceased going to mass and confession in the 1950s, but in his final years began to receive the sacraments again from Father Leopoldo Durán, a Spanish priest, who became a friend.Template:Sfn
In one of his final works, a pamphlet titled J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice (1982), Greene wrote of a legal matter that embroiled him and his extended family in Nice, and declared that organised crime flourished in Nice because the city's upper levels of civic government protected judicial and police corruption. The accusation provoked a libel lawsuit that Greene lost,[75] but he was ultimately vindicated in the 1990s when the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned for corruption and associated crimes.[76][77]Template:Sfn
In 1984, in celebration of his 80th birthday, the brewery which Greene's great-grandfather founded in 1799 made a special edition of its St. Edmund's Ale for him, with a special label in his honour.[78] 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 side of the problem is that I really don't want to survive myself [which] has nothing to do with nukes, but with the body hanging around while the mind departs."[78]
In 1986, Greene was awarded Britain's Order of Merit.[12] He died of leukaemia in 1991 at the age of 86,[6] and was buried in Corseaux cemetery.[7]
Writing style and themes
Beginning with Stamboul Train in 1932,[79][12] Greene divided his fiction into two genres: thrillers (mystery and suspense books), which he described as entertainments; and literary works, which he described as novels.[30]Template:Sfn As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between "entertainments" and "novels" to be less evident.[14][31][80] When the broadly comic Travels with My Aunt (1969) was published, the New York Times reviewer felt that it blurred the boundaries between the two: "Travels With My Aunt, the title page tells us, belongs to the 'novel' category, but reading the book very soon establishes that it is also extremely entertaining and often very funny."[81] When Heinemann and Bodley Head reissued Greene's "entertainment" The Confidential Agent and his "novel" The Power and the Glory together in 1971 as part of their Collected Edition of Greene's works, Julian Symons noted the "close relationship" between the genres;[82] as the edition progressed, Eric Ambler pointed out that Greene was redesignating all his "entertainments" as novels, adding "His reputation as a major twentieth-century novelist is likely to remain unimpaired."[83]
Greene was one of the more "cinematic" of twentieth-century writers; most of his novels and many of his plays and short stories have been adapted for film or television.[11][71] The 2014 edition of Quentin Falk's Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene lists 62 titles between 1933 and 2013 based on Greene material.Template:Sfn Some novels were filmed more than once, such as Brighton Rock in 1947 and 2011,Template:Sfn The End of the Affair in 1955 and 1999,Template:Sfn and The Quiet American in 1958 and 2002.Template:Sfn The 1936 thriller A Gun for Sale was filmed three times in English alone, notably as This Gun for Hire in 1942.Template:Sfn Greene received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948),[84] adapted from his own short story The Basement Room.[85] He also wrote several original screenplays.[12] In 1949, after writing the novella as "raw material", he wrote the screenplay for a classic film noir, The Third Man, also directed by Reed and featuring Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten.[11][17] 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.[86] Author and screenwriter Michael Korda contributed a foreword and introduction to this novel in a commemorative edition.
Greene's literary style was described by Evelyn Waugh in Commonweal as "not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry and of independent life".[87] Commenting on the lean prose and its readability, Richard Jones wrote in the Virginia Quarterly Review that "nothing deflects Greene from the main business of holding the reader's attention".[31] Greene's novels often have religious themes at their centre. In his literary criticism he attacked the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster for having lost the religious sense which, he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters, who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin".[88] Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul that carries the permanent consequence of salvation or damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and divine grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented 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 of evil.[89] Greene concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives—their mental, emotional, and spiritual depths. His stories are often set in poor, hot and dusty tropical places such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.[90]
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A stranger with no shortage of calling cards: devout Catholic, lifelong adulterer, pulpy hack, canonical novelist; self-destructive, meticulously disciplined, deliriously romantic, bitterly cynical; moral relativist, strict theologian, salon communist, closet monarchist; civilized to a stuffy fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, anti-imperialist crusader and postcolonial parasite, self-excoriating and self-aggrandizing, to name just a few.
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The novels often portray the dramatic struggles of the individual soul from a Catholic perspective.[21] Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction[21]—for example, the implication that Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, by deliberately causing his own damnation, sacrifices himself for others and thereby sanctifies his sins. His friend and fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of the Quietist heresy.Template:Sfn[92][87] 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 novel was beyond his talents.Script error: No such module "Unsubst". Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view by Edward Short is in Crisis Magazine,[89] and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by Joseph Pearce.[60]
Catholicism's prominence decreased in his later writings.Template:SfnTemplate:Efn The supernatural preoccupations of the earlier work declined and were replaced by a humanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching.[93][21][92]
In his later years, Greene was a strong critic of American imperialism and sympathised with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met.[94][95][12] Years before the Vietnam War, he prophetically attacked the idealistic but arrogant beliefs of The Quiet American, whose certainty in his own virtue kept him from seeing the disaster he inflicted on the Vietnamese.[96][12][97] In Ways of Escape, reflecting on a Mexican trip, he criticised Mexico's government for "making a hypocritical pretence of supporting Cuba" while simultaneously feeding intelligence on visitors to the American authorities.Template:Sfn In the 1930s he was already praising Ignazio Silone for his attempt to reconcile the social messages of Catholicism and Marxism;[21] in Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows".[98][99]
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 of a novel, apparently set in Italy, The Stranger's Hand: An Entertainment. Greene's friend, the film director Mario Soldati, believed it had the makings of a suspense film about Yugoslav spies in postwar Venice. Upon Soldati's prompting, Greene continued writing the story as the basis for a film script.Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn Apparently he lost interest in the project, leaving it as a substantial fragment that was published posthumously in The Graham Greene Film Reader (1993)Template:Sfn and No Man's Land (2005).Template:Sfn A script for The Stranger's Hand was written by Guy Elmes on the basis of Greene's unfinished story, and filmed by Soldati.[71]Template:SfnTemplate:Sfn In 1965, Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition pseudonymously, and won an honourable mention.
Nobel Prize in Literature candidate
Acclaimed during his lifetime, Greene was for many years a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he was shortlisted for the prize several times by the Nobel committee.[3] In 1961 he was among the final three candidates for the prize. Anders Österling, chair of the Nobel committee, stated that Greene "is fully worthy of the prize, not just in regard of his most recent work [A Burnt-Out Case], but for his vigorous work as a whole", but the prize that year was awarded to the Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andrić.[1][100]
In 1966[2] and 1967, Greene was again among the final three choices, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary. For the 1967 prize the committee also considered Jorge Luis Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias. Committee chairman Anders Österling again pushed for a prize to Greene describing him as "an accomplished observer whose experience encompasses a global diversity of external environments, and above all the mysterious aspects of the inner world, human conscience, anxiety and nightmares", but ultimately Asturias was the chosen winner.[101][102][103]
In 1969, when Samuel Beckett and André Malraux were the main contenders for the prize, Greene's candidacy was however dismissed by the Nobel committee. Committee member Karl Ragnar Gierow stated: "Despite my admiration for several of his earlier works, I would not even then have placed him in the class where a Nobel laureate belongs".[104] The following year Gierow further elaborated that Greene's best work was too far back in time, and that his most recent novel Travels With My Aunt was not of Nobel prize class, stating "If the committee excludes him from its proposal this year, it seems to mean that it considers him out of the discussion, in case he does not return to the level that once made his name relevant."[105]
Following the publication of his novel The Honorary Consul, Greene was shortlisted again in 1974, but this time the Nobel committee was hesitant to award an English language novelist for a second year in succession following the prize awarded to Patrick White the previous year, and Greene was passed over.[106]
Greene remained a favourite to win the Nobel prize in the 1980s, but it was known that two influential members of the Swedish Academy, Artur Lundkvist and Lars Gyllensten, opposed the prize for Greene and he was never awarded.[107]Template:Efn
Legacy
Greene is regarded as a major 20th-century novelist,Template:Sfn and was praised by John Irving, before Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language".[108] Novelist Frederick Buechner called Greene's novel The Power and the Glory a "tremendous influence".[109] By 1943, Greene had acquired the reputation of being the "leading English male novelist of his generation",Template:Sfn and at the time of his death in 1991 had a reputation as a writer of both deeply serious novels on the theme of Catholicism,[110] and of "suspense-filled stories of detection".[111]
Greene collected several literary awards for his novels, including the 1941 Hawthornden Prize for The Power and the Glory[12][112] and the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter.[113][114] As an author, he received the 1968 Shakespeare PrizeTemplate:Sfn and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society.[72][73] In 1986, he was awarded Britain's Order of Merit.[12]
The Graham Greene International Festival is an annual four-day event of conference papers, informal talks, question and answer sessions, films, dramatised readings, music, creative writing workshops and social events. It is organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and takes place in the writer's home town of Berkhamsted (about 35 miles north-west of London), on dates as close as possible to the anniversary of his birth (2 October). Its purpose is to promote interest in and study of the works of Graham Greene.[115]
He is the subject of the 2013 documentary film, Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene.[116] His 1987 trip to Moscow to visit Kim Philby is the subject of Ben Brown's play A Splinter of Ice (first staged 2021 and filmed that year); Oliver Ford Davies originally played Greene.[117][118] Greene also features as a character in the film The Honourable Rebel (2015) about Elizabeth Montagu who worked with him on the script of The Third Man.[119][120] In the 2001 film Donnie Darko, the protagonist is inspired by a classroom discussion of Greene's short story "The Destructors" and its line "destruction after all is a form of creation".[121]
Selected works
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- The Man Within (debut; 1929)
- Stamboul Train (1932; also published as Orient Express in the US)
- It's a Battlefield (1934)
- England Made Me (also published as The Shipwrecked; 1935)
- A Gun for Sale (1936)
- Journey Without Maps (1936)
- Brighton Rock (1938)
- The Lawless Roads (1939; also published as Another Mexico in the US)
- The Confidential Agent (1939)
- The Power and the Glory (1940)
- The Ministry of Fear (1943)
- The Heart of the Matter (1948)
- The Third Man (1950; novella written in 1948 as a preliminary to Greene's screenplay for the film The Third Man)
- The End of the Affair (1951)
- Twenty-One Stories (1954; short stories)
- Loser Takes All (1955)
- The Quiet American (1955)
- The Potting Shed (1956)
- Our Man in Havana (1958)
- A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
- In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961)
- The Comedians (1966)
- Travels with My Aunt (1969)
- A Sort of Life (1971)
- The Honorary Consul (1973)
- The Human Factor (1978)
- Ways of Escape (1980)
- Doctor Fischer of Geneva (1980)
- Monsignor Quixote (1982)
- Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement (1984)
- The Tenth Man (1985)
- The Captain and the Enemy (1988)
- The Last Word (1990; short stories)
Notes
References
Citations
Works cited
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Further reading
- Graham Greene Studies (journal), University of North Georgia - Digital Commons, bepress, Elsevier
- Allain, Marie-Françoise, 1983. The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. Bodley Head.
- Bergonzi, Bernard, 2006. A Study in Greene: Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel. Oxford University Press.
- Cloetta, Yvonne, 2004. In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene, translated by Euan Cameron. Bloomsbury.
- Fallowell, Duncan, 20th Century Characters, Loaded: Graham Greene at home in Antibes (London, Vintage Books, 1994)
- Fussell, Paul (1980). "Graham Greene's Parallel Journey", in Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford University Press, pp. 65-70.
- Greene, Richard, editor, 2007. Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. Knopf Canada.
- Hazzard, Shirley, 2000. Greene on Capri. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
- Henríquez Jiménez, Santiago J. La realidad y la construcción de la ficción en la novelística de Graham Greene, La Laguna: Universidad, 1992.
- Henríquez Jiménez, Santiago J. "Graham Greene's novels seen in the Light of His Religious Discourse" en Wm. Thomas Hill (ed.). Perceptions of Religious Faith in the Work of Graham Greene. Oxford, New York...: Peter Lang. 2002. 657–685.
- Henríquez Jiménez, Santiago J. "Don Quijote de la Mancha y Monsignor Quixote: la inspiración castellana de Grahan Greene en el clásico español de Cervantes" en José Manuel Barrio Marco y María José Crespo Allué (eds.). La huella de Cervantes y del Quijote en la cultura anglosajona. Centro Buendía y Universidad de Valladolid. Valladolid. 2007. 311–318.
- Henríquez Jiménez, Santiago J. "Miguel de Unamuno y Graham Greene: coincidencias en torno a los cuidados de la fe" en Teresa Gibert Maceda y Laura Alba Juez (coord..). Estudios de Filología Inglesa. Homenaje a la Dra. Asunción Alba Pelayo. Madrid: UNED. 2008. 421–430.
- Hull, Christopher. Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel (Pegasus Books, 2019) online review
- Phillips, Gene D., 1974. Graham Greene: Films of His Fiction, Teachers' College Press.
- O'Prey, Paul, 1988. A Reader's Guide to Graham Greene. Thames and Hudson.
- Shelden, Michael, 1994. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. William Heinemann. Random House ed., 1995, Template:ISBN
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- Valentinitsch, Bernhard. "Graham Greenes Roman 'The Human Factor' (1978) und Otto Premingers gleichnamige Verfilmung (1979)". In: JIPSS (Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies), No. 14. Graz 2021, p. 34-56.
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External links
Template:Sister project Template:Sister project
- Digital collections
- Physical collections
- Graham Greene Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
- Graham Greene Papers; Template:Webarchive at John J. Burns Library, Boston College
- Graham Greene Collection at Emory University
- Graham Greene Letters at Columbia University
- Bryan Forbes Collection of Graham Greene; Template:Webarchive at the British Library
- The Cherry Record Collection of Josephine Reid's Papers and Books Relating to Graham Greene at Balliol College Archives & Manuscripts
- Other links
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- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n Michael Shelden, 'Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2008 accessed 15 May 2011
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- ↑ 13 Must-Read Graham Greene Books earlybirdbooks.com, accessed 31 October 2020
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- ↑ Christopher Hawtree. "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys". The Guardian, 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
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- ↑ Greene's introduction to the Philby book is mentioned in Christopher Hitchens' introduction to Our Man in Havana (pg xx of the Penguin Classics edition)
- ↑ "The Spy Who Wrote Me: Burns Lands Graham Greene Correspondence With Soviet Agent." Boston College Chronicle, Volume 8, Number 4, 14 October 1999.
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- ↑ a b Joseph Pearce. "Graham Greene: Doubter Par Excellence", CatholicAuthors.com. Retrieved 7 January 2011.
- ↑ The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990. Introduction by John Updike, p. xiv.
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