Graham Greene

British writer, playwright and literary critic (1904–1991)

For other people named Graham Greene, see Graham Greene (disambiguation).

Graham Greene

OM CH

Greene in 1975

Born| Henry Graham Greene
(1904-10-02)2 October 1904
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England
Died| 3 April 1991(1991-04-03) (aged 86)
Corseaux, Switzerland
Occupation|

* Writer
* journalist

Alma mater| Balliol College, Oxford
Period| 1925–1991
Genre|

* Literary fiction
* thriller

Notable works|

* Stamboul Train (1932)
* 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)

Spouse|

Vivien Dayrell-Browning

(m. 1927; sep. 1947)​

Partner| Catherine Walston, Lady Walston (1946–1966)
Yvonne Cloetta (1966–1991)
Children| 2
Relatives| Raymond Greene (brother); Graham C. Greene (nephew)

Henry Graham Greene 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 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)

[edit]

Greene was born in Berkhamsted School where his father taught. Graham Greene's birthplace blue plaque

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;[13] 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.[14] Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during World War II.[15]

In his childhood, Greene spent his summers at Harston House, the Cambridgeshire home of his uncle, Sir Graham Greene.[16][17] 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..."[18]

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,[19] he was sent for psychoanalysis for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day student.[20] School friends included the journalist Claud Cockburn and the historian Peter Quennell.[21]

Greene contributed several stories to the school magazine,[22] one of which was published by a London evening newspaper[23][12] in January 1921.

### Oxford University

[edit]

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.[24] In 1925, while he was an undergraduate at Balliol, his first work, a poorly received volume of poetry titled Babbling April, was published.[24]

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.[24]

## Writing career

[edit]

After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the Nottingham Journal,[25][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][26][27] 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".[28] Greene was baptised on 28 February 1926[29] and they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London.[30]

The Man Within (1929) was Greene's first published novel;[a] after its favourable reception he left his job at The Times to work full-time as a novelist.[34][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][b] His first true success was Stamboul Train (1932) which was taken on by the Book Society[36] and adapted as the film Orient Express, in 1934.[37]

Although Greene objected to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic,[c] 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.[41] 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.[42] His later political affiliations and convictions were more ambiguous.[43]

He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day.[44][31] His collected film reviews were later published as The Pleasure Dome (1972).[45] Greene's 1937 film review[46] 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"[47]—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs,[48][49] and Greene left the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over.[50][51] While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory.[50][12]

By the 1950s, Greene had become known as one of the finest writers of his generation.[52][53]

Greene also wrote short stories and plays,[40] which were well received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist.[54] 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.[55][56]

His writing influences included Henry James, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, Marcel Proust, Charles Péguy and John Buchan.[57][58][59]

### Travel and espionage

[edit]

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.[40][60][61] Greene himself responded to commentators who called the world of his fiction an imaginary place:

> 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 Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water...'[62]

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.[63] Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6.[64][65] Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944.[66] He later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War.[67] 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.[68]

Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip to Liberia that produced the travel book Journey Without Maps.[69] 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.[31] 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.[70]

In 1954, Greene travelled to Haiti,[71] where The Comedians (1966) is set,[72] 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.[73] 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.[74] 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.[75]

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.[76] 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][77][60] 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.[76] 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."[76]

### Publishing career

[edit]

Between 1944 and 1948, Greene was director at Eyre & Spottiswoode under chairman Douglas Jerrold, in charge of developing its fiction list.[78][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.[79]

He was a director at The Bodley Head from 1957 to 1968 under Max Reinhardt.[80] 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.[81]

## Personal life

[edit]

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 (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936).[11]

In his discussions with Father George Trollope,[82] 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",[83] 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.[84] 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.[85] 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.[86][87] Greene left his family in 1947,[88] but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching,[89] and they remained married until Greene's death in 1991.[90][91]

Greene lived with manic depression (bipolar disorder).[92][93] He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life.[94] 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".[95]

## Final years

[edit]

Gravestone at Corseaux, Switzerland

Greene left Britain in 1966, moving to Antibes,[96] to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death.[11][26] In 1973, he had an uncredited cameo appearance as an insurance company representative in François Truffaut's film Day for Night.[97] In 1981, Greene was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.[98][99]

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][100] His book Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980) is based on themes of combined philosophical and geographical influences.[clarification needed] 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.[101]

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,[102] but he was ultimately vindicated in the 1990s when the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned for corruption and associated crimes.[103][104][105]

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.[106] 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."[106]

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

[edit]

Cover of the second German edition of The Quiet American (1956), claiming to be on sale only 8 weeks after the first edition, with the implication that the first is already sold out

Beginning with Stamboul Train in 1932,[35][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.[40][107] As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between "entertainments" and "novels" to be less evident.[19][54][39] 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."[108] 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;[109] 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."[110]

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][97] 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.[111] Some novels were filmed more than once, such as Brighton Rock in 1947 and 2011,[112] The End of the Affair in 1955 and 1999,[113] and The Quiet American in 1958 and 2002.[114] The 1936 thriller A Gun for Sale was filmed three times in English alone, notably as This Gun for Hire in 1942.[115] Greene received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948),[116] adapted from his own short story The Basement Room.[117] 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][26] In 1983, The Honorary Consul, published ten years earlier, was released as a film (under the title Beyond the Limit in some territories), starring Michael Caine and Richard Gere.[118] 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".[119] 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".[54] 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".[120] 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.[121] 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.[122]

> 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.

The Nation, describing the many facets of Graham Greene[123]

The novels often portray the dramatic struggles of the individual soul from a Catholic perspective.[31] Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction[31]—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.[124][125][119] 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.[citation needed] Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view by Edward Short is in Crisis Magazine,[121] and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by Joseph Pearce.[83]

Catholicism's prominence decreased in his later writings.[126][d] 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.[127][31][125]

In his later years, Greene was a strong critic of American imperialism and sympathised with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met.[128][129][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.[130][12][131] 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.[132] In the 1930s he was already praising Ignazio Silone for his attempt to reconcile the social messages of Catholicism and Marxism;[31] in Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows".[133][134]

> In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.

— Graham Greene

In May 1949, the New Statesman held a contest for parodies of Greene's writing style: he himself submitted an entry under the name "N. Wilkinson", and took second place. Greene's entry comprised the first two paragraphs 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.[135][136] Apparently he lost interest in the project, leaving it as a substantial fragment that was published posthumously in The Graham Greene Film Reader (1993)[137] and No Man's Land (2005).[138] A script for The Stranger's Hand was written by Guy Elmes on the basis of Greene's unfinished story, and filmed by Soldati.[97][139][140] In 1965, Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition pseudonymously, and won an honourable mention.

## Nobel Prize in Literature candidate

[edit]

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][141]

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.[142][143][144]

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".[145] 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."[146]

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.[147]

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.[148][e]

## Legacy

[edit]

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,[149] and was praised by John Irving, before Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language".[150] Novelist Frederick Buechner called Greene's novel The Power and the Glory a "tremendous influence".[151] By 1943, Greene had acquired the reputation of being the "leading English male novelist of his generation",[152] 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,[153] and of "suspense-filled stories of detection".[154]

Greene collected several literary awards for his novels, including the 1941 Hawthornden Prize for The Power and the Glory[12][155] and the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter.[156][157] As an author, he received the 1968 Shakespeare Prize[158] and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society.[98][99] 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.[159]

He is the subject of the 2013 documentary film, Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene.[160] 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.[161][162] 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.[163][164] 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".[165]

## Selected works

[edit]

Main article: Graham Greene bibliography

* 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

[edit]

1. ^ This was the third novel Greene had completed.[31] 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.[32][33]
2. ^ In 1974, Greene said he had suppressed them from the Bodley Head-Heinemann Collected Edition of his works "without hesitation".[35]
3. ^ 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."[38] Greene rejected the label on other occasions.[39][40][29]
4. ^ 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".[38]
5. ^ When an interviewer asked Greene in 1984 about his persistent failure to win the prize, he replied, "Don't let's talk about it... It's always the same story of poor Mr Arthur Lundqvist saying 'over my dead body'."[129]

## References

[edit]

### Citations

[edit]

1. ^ a b Neuman, Ricki (3 January 2012). "Graham Greene var nära Nobelpris 1961". Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish).
2. ^ a b "Nomination archive: Graham Greene". 21 May 2024.
3. ^ a b Steensma, Robert C. (1997). Encyclopedia of the Essay. Taylor & Francis. p. 264\. ISBN 9781884964305.
4. ^ a b Donaghy, Henry J. (1983). Graham Greene, an Introduction to His Writings. Rodopi. p. 13\. ISBN 9062035353.
5. ^ a b Sweeney, Jon (2008). Almost Catholic: An Appreciation of the History, Practice, and Mystery of Ancient Faith. United States: Jossey-Bass. p. 23\. ISBN 978-0787994709.
6. ^ a b c Graham Greene, The Major Novels: A Centenary Archived 27 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine by Kevin McGowin, Eclectica Magazine
7. ^ a b c "Graham Greene finds no Swiss cuckoo clocks". Swissinfo.ch. 19 May 2006. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
8. ^ Stade, George, ed. (12 May 2010). Encyclopedia of British Writers, 1800 to the Present. Vol. 1\. Infobase. p. 218\. ISBN 9781438116891. Retrieved 28 January 2021.
9. ^ Pritchett, V. S. (26 February 1978). "The Human Factor in Graham Greene". The New York Times.
10. ^ Cook, John (2009). A Glimpse of our History: a short guided tour of Berkhamsted (PDF). Berkhamsted Town Council. Archived from the original (PDF) on 27 September 2011.
11. ^ 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
12. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n "Obituaries: Graham Greene". The Times. No. 63983\. 4 April 1991. p. 16.
13. ^ Iyer 2012, p. 8.
14. ^ Sherry 1990, pp. 3–4.
15. ^ Lewis, Jeremy (2010). Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family. London: Jonathan Cape. pp. 216–233, 496–497\. ISBN 978-0224079211.
16. ^ Greene 1971, pp. 23–24.
17. ^ Sherry 1990, p. 52.
18. ^ Greene 1971, pp. 24–25.
19. ^ a b Lambert, J.W. (5 March 1978). "A Guide to Greeneland". The Sunday Times. No. 8071\. p. 37.
20. ^ Iyer 2012, p. 9.
21. ^ Sherry 1990, p. 110.
22. ^ Sherry 1990, pp. 113–114.
23. ^ Greene 1971, p. 110.
24. ^ a b c "Graham Greene Biography". notablebiographies.com. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
25. ^ "Graham Greene". Biogs.com. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
26. ^ a b c "Obituary: Graham Greene". The Daily Telegraph. No. 42231\. 4 April 1991. p. 21.
27. ^ Sherry 1990, p. 179.
28. ^ Greene 1971, pp. 164–165.
29. ^ a b Sinyard 2003, p. 3.
30. ^ Sherry 1990, pp. 352–354.
31. ^ a b c d e f g Thomson, Ian (22 August 2006). "Graham Greene, uneasy Catholic". Times Literary Supplement. Archived from the original on 15 June 2011. Retrieved 28 June 2025.
32. ^ Flood, Alison (9 July 2009). "Lost Greene novel to be serialised in crime magazine". The Guardian. Retrieved 21 December 2024.
33. ^ McGrath, Charles (14 July 2009). "'New' Graham Greene Mystery To Be Published". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 December 2024.
34. ^ Howard, Philip (4 April 1991). "Farewell to the icy slopes of Greeneland". The Times. No. 63983\. p. 1.
35. ^ a b Greene, Graham (21 June 1974). "Train of Thought". The Daily Telegraph. No. 37038\. p. 61.
36. ^ Sherry 1990, p. 442.
37. ^ ""Orient Express." AFI Catalog". Retrieved 20 August 2024.
38. ^ a b Burgess, Anthony (16 March 1980). "'God and literature and so forth...'". The Observer. pp. 33, 35.
39. ^ a b Ratcliffe, Michael (2 October 1980). "On the run in Greeneland". The Times. No. 60739\. p. 12.
40. ^ a b c d "Graham Greene, 86, Dies; Novelist of the Soul". The New York Times. 4 April 1991. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
41. ^ Bosco, Mark (21 January 2005). Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination. Oxford University Press. p. 3\. ISBN 9780198039358.
42. ^ Sherry 1990, pp. 410, 456–461.
43. ^ Sherry 1994, pp. 479, 494–496.
44. ^ Greene 1981, p. 59.
45. ^ Greene, Graham (1980) [1st pub. Secker & Warburg 1972]. Taylor, John Russell (ed.). The Pleasure Dome: Collected Film Criticism 1935-40. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-281286-6.
46. ^ "Graham Greene's infamous review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937), starring Shirley Temple". The Charnel-House. 26 February 2014. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
47. ^ Parkinson 1995, pp. 233–234.
48. ^ Atkinson, Michael (21 August 2009). "Our Man in London". movingimagesource.us.
49. ^ Chancellor, Alexander (22 February 2014). "Was Graham Greene right about Shirley Temple?". The Spectator.
50. ^ a b Johnson, Andrew (18 November 2007). "Shirley Temple scandal was real reason Graham Greene fled to Mexico". The Independent.
51. ^ Vickers, Graham (1 August 2008). Chasing Lolita: How Popular Culture Corrupted Nabokov's Little Girl All Over Again. Chicago Review Press. p. 64. ISBN 9781556526824.
52. ^ Barrett, D. (2009). "Graham Greene". In Poole, A. (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to English Novelists. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 423–437. doi:10.1017/CCOL9780521871198.027. ISBN 9780521871198.
53. ^ 13 Must-Read Graham Greene Books earlybirdbooks.com, accessed 31 October 2020
54. ^ a b c "The Improbable Spy". Vqronline.org. Archived from the original on 20 November 2008. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
55. ^ Korda, Michael (1999). Another Life: A Memoir of Other People. United States: Random House. pp. 312–325. ISBN 0-679-45659-7.
56. ^ Korda, Michael (11 July 1999). "Another Life: A Memoir of Other People Interview". booknotes.org. C-Span. Retrieved 30 December 2016.
57. ^ Miller, R. H. (1990). Understanding Graham Greene. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 0-87249-704-6.
58. ^ Pendleton, Robert (1996). Graham Greene's Conradian Masterplot. Suffolk: MacMillan Press. ISBN 0-333-62888-8.
59. ^ Diemert 1996.
60. ^ a b Clifford, Frank (4 April 1991). "Graham Greene Dies; One of Century's Great Writers". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 8 June 2025.
61. ^ Iyengar, Sunil (13 January 2021). "Our Man in the Stacks". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
62. ^ Greene 1981, p. 60.
63. ^ Christopher Hawtree. "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys". The Guardian, 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
64. ^ Royal, Robert (November 1999). "The (Mis)Guided Dream of Graham Greene". First Things. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
65. ^ "BBC—BBC Four Documentaries—Arena: Graham Greene". BBC News. 3 October 2004. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
66. ^ Brennan, Michael G. (18 March 2010). Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith and Authorship. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4411-3742-5.
67. ^ 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)
68. ^ "The Spy Who Wrote Me: Burns Lands Graham Greene Correspondence With Soviet Agent." Boston College Chronicle, Volume 8, Number 4, 14 October 1999.
69. ^ Butcher, Tim (2010). "Graham Greene: Our Man in Liberia". History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 10. Retrieved 20 March 2012. "insisted this trip, his first to Africa and his first outside Europe"
70. ^ "EUROPE | Vatican's bid to censure Graham Greene". BBC News. 3 November 2000. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
71. ^ Theroux, Paul (1 January 2004). Introduction to The Comedians. Random House. p. v. ISBN 9780099478379.
72. ^ Diederich, Bernard (2012). Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954–1983. Peter Owen.
73. ^ Campbell, Duncan (17 December 2005). "Drinking, dancing and death". The Guardian.
74. ^ Greene, Graham (1961). A Burnt-Out Case. New York (Amer. ed.): The Viking Press. p. vii–viii.
75. ^ Neave, Airey (1970). The Escape Room. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. pp. 126–127.
76. ^ a b c Miller, Tom (14 April 1991). "Sex, Spies and Literature; Graham Greene's Cuba: Helping Fidel Was the Heart of the Matter". Washington Post.
77. ^ Sherry, Norman (4 April 1991). "Obituary: Graham Greene". The Independent. No. 1394\. p. 3.
78. ^ Greene, Richard (2011). Graham Greene: A Life in Letters.
79. ^ Sherry 1994, pp. 189–90, 200–204.
80. ^ Hill, Mike (2015). The Works of Graham Greene, Volume 2: A Guide to the Graham Greene Archives. p. 33.
81. ^ Rose, Kenneth (22 March 1970). "Quiet Englishman". The Sunday Telegraph. No. 475\. p. 36.
82. ^ ""Like a Birthmark": Graham Greene's Catholicism". 26 December 2003.
83. ^ a b Joseph Pearce. "Graham Greene: Doubter Par Excellence", CatholicAuthors.com. Retrieved 7 January 2011.
84. ^ The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990. Introduction by John Updike, p. xiv.
85. ^ McCrum, Robert (16 January 2000). "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". The Guardian.
86. ^ Schwartz, Adam (1 February 2005). The Third Spring: G.K. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Christopher Dawson, and David Jones. CUA Press. pp. 181–182\. ISBN 9780813213873.
87. ^ Hastings, Chris (29 November 2008). "Graham Greene's love poems to mistress who inspired The End of the Affair". The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 11 January 2022.
88. ^ Sherry 1994, pp. 275–276.
89. ^ Sherry 1994, pp. 283–287.
90. ^ Hawtree, Christopher (21 August 2003). "Vivien Greene: Wife of Graham Greene and collector of doll's houses". The Independent. Retrieved 7 June 2025.
91. ^ Luther, Claudia (25 August 2003). "Vivien Greene, 98; Wife of Novelist Was a Collector of Dollhouses". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 7 June 2025.
92. ^ Sherry 2004, p. 252.
93. ^ Thorpe, Vanessa (9 August 1998). "Graham Greene Bipolar". The Independent.
94. ^ "Extract from Graham Greene: A Life in Letters edited by Richard Greene". The Times. 13 September 2007. Archived from the original on 17 May 2011.
95. ^ "Graham Greene: A Life In Letters – Book Reviews – Books – Entertainment". The Sydney Morning Herald. 30 November 2007. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
96. ^ Jordison, Sam (15 June 2012). "Reading group: Travels with My Aunt and the many shades of Greene". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 May 2022.
97. ^ a b c Caterson, John. "Greene, Graham (1904-1991)". Screenonline. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
98. ^ a b "The Jerusalem Prize | Previous Winners". jbookforum.com. Retrieved 20 August 2024.
99. ^ a b Shipler, David K. (7 April 1981). "Israeli Book Fair Honors Greene, Amid Protests". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 October 2024.
100. ^ Sherry 2004, p. 783.
101. ^ Sherry 2004, pp. 691, 695.
102. ^ Eder, Richard (5 February 1982). "On the Riviera, A Morality Tale by Graham Greene". archive.nytimes.com.
103. ^ Randall, Colin (4 April 1991). "Homage paid to Graham Greene". The Daily Telegraph. No. 42231\. p. 1.
104. ^ Whitney, Craig R. (19 November 1998). "Jacques Medecin, 70, Dies; French Mayor". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 August 2024.
105. ^ Sherry 2004, pp. 654–655.
106. ^ a b Vinocur, John (3 March 1985). "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". New York Times Magazine. New York.
107. ^ Falk 2014, p. 68.
108. ^ Boston, Richard (25 January 1970). "Greene Being Funny About Greene and Serious About Life". The New York Times. Retrieved 16 June 2025.
109. ^ Symons, Julian (16 May 1971). "Collected Greene". The Sunday Times. No. 7719\. p. 33.
110. ^ Ambler, Eric (30 November 1974). "A better sort of rubbish". The Times. No. 59258\. p. 8.
111. ^ Falk 2014.
112. ^ Falk 2014, pp. 145–151.
113. ^ Falk 2014, pp. 72–75, 136–139.
114. ^ Falk 2014, pp. 141–145.
115. ^ Falk 2014, pp. 10–15, 90–93, 168.
116. ^ "The 22nd Academy Awards | 1950". oscars.org. 3 October 2014. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
117. ^ Angelini, Sergio. "Fallen Idol, The (1948)". Screenonline. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
118. ^ Canby, Vincent (30 September 1983). "Film: 'Beyond the Limit,' From Graham Greene". The New York Times. Retrieved 13 September 2024.
119. ^ a b Waugh, Evelyn (16 July 1948). "Felix Culpa: On Graham Greene". Commonweal. Retrieved 28 June 2025.
120. ^ "First Things". Angelfire.com. 9 October 2004. Archived from the original on 11 November 2009. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
121. ^ a b Short, Edward (1 April 2005). "The Catholic Novels of Graham Greene". Crisis. Retrieved 8 August 2025.
122. ^ "Regions of the Mind: The Exoticism of Greeneland". Dur.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 18 April 2009. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
123. ^ Not Easy Being Greene: Graham Greene's Letters by Michelle Orange, The Nation, 15 April 2009
124. ^ Falk 2014, p. 66.
125. ^ a b Meyers, Jeffrey (29 May 2024). "The odd couple: Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene may have been unlike as possible, but they remained the closest of friends for four decades". The Critic. Retrieved 18 June 2025.
126. ^ Sinyard 2003, p. 5.
127. ^ Johnson, Daniel (4 April 1991). "Whisky priest of the novel: Daniel Johnson assesses Graham Greene, lifelong student of mankind's evil". The Times. No. 63983\. p. 14.
128. ^ Liukkonen, Petri. "Graham Greene". Books and Writers. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 27 July 2005.
129. ^ a b Lebrecht, Norman (1 April 1984). "The Greene Factor". The Sunday Times. No. 8330\. pp. 33–34.
130. ^ For Greene's views on politics, see also Burgess, Anthony (1967). "Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene". Journal of Contemporary History. 2 (2): 93–99\. doi:10.1177/002200946700200208. S2CID 153416421.
131. ^ Whitney, Joel (15 June 2022). "Our Man in Hollywood: A tangled tale from the culture wars of the 1950s". The Baffler. Retrieved 5 June 2025.
132. ^ Greene 1981, pp. 63–64.
133. ^ P.xii of John Updike's introduction to The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990.
134. ^ Greene, Graham (1970) [1st pub. Bodley Head 1969]. Collected Essays. London: Penguin Books. p. 262\. ISBN 0-14-018576-3.
135. ^ Parkinson 1995, p. 623.
136. ^ Sexton 2005, p. ix.
137. ^ Parkinson 1995, pp. 623–666.
138. ^ Sexton 2005, pp. 55–103.
139. ^ Parkinson 1995, pp. 623–624.
140. ^ Sexton 2005, pp. xxiii–xxiv.
141. ^ Neuman, Ricki (3 January 2012). "Graham Greene var nära Nobelpris 1961". Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish).
142. ^ Schueler, Kaj (January 2018). "Hemliga dokument visar kampen om Nobelpriset". Svenska Dagbladet. Retrieved 3 January 2018.
143. ^ Carter, David (28 March 2013). How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hesperus Press. p. 22\. ISBN 9781780940403.
144. ^ Feldman, Burton (3 October 2001). The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige. Arcade Publishing. p. 96. ISBN 9781559705370.
145. ^ "Nobelkommitténs sammansättning och utlåtande 1969" (in Swedish). Svenska Akademien.
146. ^ "Yttrande av Herr Gierow" (PDF). Svenska Akademien. "Graham Greenes produktion har i stort sett hållit sig jämnare, men också för honom ligger de prisvärda verken långt i det förgångna. Sedan hans namn i fjol stod på kommitténs för- slagslista, har han kommit med en ny roman, Travels with Aunt, skriven med säker hand, fränt lynne och en fabulering, som inte ett ögonblick tröttnar, vilket däremot händer läsaren. Den bredmynta burlesken höjer sig i slutet till ett annat plan, dock inte det där ett Nobelpris hör hemma. När kommittén i år utesluter honom från sitt förslag lär det betyda, att den anser honom borta ur diskussionen, för den händelse han inte skulle vända tillbaka till den nivå, som en gång gjorde hans namn aktuellt."
147. ^ "Särskilt yttrande av herr Gierow (pdf)" (PDF) (in Swedish). Svenska Akademien. 6 June 1974.
148. ^ Markham, James M. (7 October 1983). "Briton Wins the Nobel Literature Prize". The New York Times.
149. ^ Diemert 1996, pp. 5, 183.
150. ^ Irving, John. The Imaginary Girlfriend. New York, Ballantine Books, 2002, p. 31.
151. ^ Brown, W. Dale (1997). Of fiction and faith : twelve American writers talk about their vision and work. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans. ISBN 0802843131. OCLC 36994237.
152. ^ Diemert 1996, p. 179.
153. ^ Thomson, Ian (3 October 2004). "More Sherry trifles". The Observer.
154. ^ Kohn, Lynette (1961). Graham Greene: The Major Novels. Stanford University Press. p. 23.
155. ^ "Previous winners of the Hawthornden Prize". hawthornden.org. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
156. ^ "The James Tait Black Prizes | Fiction Winners". ed.ac.uk. 26 July 2023. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
157. ^ "Book Prizes Awarded". The Times. No. 51288\. 25 January 1949. p. 2.
158. ^ Sherry 2004, p. 483.
159. ^ "Home". Graham Greene. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
160. ^ Jones, Kimberley (30 April 2013). "DVD Watch: 'Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene'". Austin Chronicle. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
161. ^ Akbar, Arifa (15 April 2021). "Graham Greene's showdown with Soviet spy Kim Philby: A Splinter of Ice review". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 June 2025.
162. ^ Clapp, Susannah (25 April 2021). "A Splinter of Ice review – Graham Greene and Kim Philby clink glasses". The Guardian. Retrieved 7 June 2025.
163. ^ "Story of Elizabeth Montagu to Play at UK Cinemas". beaulieu.co.uk. 24 November 2015. Retrieved 21 June 2025.
164. ^ Connolly, Kate (10 July 1999). "Harry in the shadow". The Guardian. Retrieved 20 June 2025.
165. ^ French, Philip (27 October 2002). "Into the heart of Darko". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 May 2024.

### Works cited

[edit]

* Diemert, Brian (1996). Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0773514333.
* Falk, Quentin (2014). Travels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene (4th ed.). Dahlonega, GA: University Press of North Georgia. ISBN 978-1-940771-13-7.
* Greene, Graham (1971). A Sort of Life. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-0-671-21010-6.
* Greene, Graham (1981) [1st pub. Bodley Head 1980]. Ways of Escape. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ISBN 014018581X.
* Iyer, Pico (2012). The Man within My Head: Graham Greene, My Father and Me. London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 9781408829028.
* Parkinson, David, ed. (1995) [1st pub. Carcanet Press 1993]. The Graham Greene Film Reader: Reviews, Essays, Interviews and Film Stories. New York: Applause Books. ISBN 1-55783-188-2.
* Sexton, James, ed. (2005). Graham Greene: No Man's Land. London: Hesperus. ISBN 1-84391-414-X.
* Sherry, Norman (1990). The Life of Graham Greene, Volume One: 1904-1939. London: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-013123-X.
* Sherry, Norman (1994). The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two: 1939-1955. New York: Viking. ISBN 0-670-86056-5.
* Sherry, Norman (2004). The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Three: 1955-1991. London: Jonathan Cape. ISBN 0-2240-5974-2.
* Sinyard, Neil (2003). Graham Greene: A Literary Life. Houndmills; New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-72986-2.

## Further reading

[edit]

* 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, ISBN 0-679-42883-6
* Simon Raven & Martin Shuttleworth "Graham Greene Interviewed, The Art of Fiction No. 3". The Paris Review. Autumn 1953 (3). Autumn 1953.
* West, William John (1998). The quest for Graham Greene (1st US ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 978-0-312-18161-1.
* Bernhard Valentinitsch,Graham Greenes Roman 'The Human Factor'(1978) und Otto Premingers gleichnamige Verfilmung (1979). In:JIPSS (= Journal for Intelligence,Propaganda and Security),Nr.14.Graz 2021,p. 34-56.

## External links

[edit]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Graham Greene (writer).

Wikiquote has quotations related to Graham Greene.

Digital collections

* Works by Graham Greene in eBook form at Standard Ebooks
* Works by or about Graham Greene at the Internet Archive
* Works by Graham Greene at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)

Physical collections

* Graham Greene Papers at the Harry Ransom Center
* Graham Greene Papers Archived 5 December 2022 at the Wayback Machine 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 Archived 20 September 2022 at the Wayback Machine 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

* Graham Greene at IMDb

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Graham Greene

Bibliography

Novels|

* The Man Within (1929)
* The Name of Action (1930)
* Rumour at Nightfall (1932)
* Stamboul Train (1932)
* It's a Battlefield (1934)
* England Made Me (1935)
* A Gun for Sale (1936)
* Brighton Rock (1938)
* The Confidential Agent (1939)
* The Power and the Glory (1940)
* The Ministry of Fear (1943)
* The Heart of the Matter (1948)
* The Third Man (novella; 1949)
* The End of the Affair (1951)
* The Quiet American (1955)
* Loser Takes All (1955)
* Our Man in Havana (1958)
* A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
* The Comedians (1966)
* Travels with My Aunt (1969)
* The Honorary Consul (1973)
* The Human Factor (1978)
* Doctor Fischer of Geneva (1980)
* Monsignor Quixote (1982)
* The Tenth Man (1985)
* The Captain and the Enemy (1988)
* No Man's Land (2005)

Non-fiction|

* Journey Without Maps (1936)
* The Lawless Roads (1939)
* The Lost Childhood and Other Essays (1951)
* In Search of a Character (1961)
* A Sort of Life (1971)
* Ways of Escape (1980)
* Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement (1984)

Plays|

* The Living Room (1953)
* The Potting Shed (1957)
* The Complaisant Lover (1959)
* Carving a Statue (1964)
* The Return of A. J. Raffles (1975)
* The Great Jowett (1981)
* Yes and No (1983)
* For Whom the Bell Chimes (1983)

Story collections|

* Twenty-One Stories (1954)
* A Sense of Reality (1963)
* May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)

Short stories|

* "The End of the Party" (1929)
* "Proof Positive" (1930)
* "Across the Bridge" (1938)
* "Alas, Poor Maling" (1940)
* "The Blue Film" (1954)
* "The Destructors" (1954)
* "A Shocking Accident"
* "The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen"
* "The Last Word"

Screenplays|

* 21 Days (1940)
* Brighton Rock (1948)
* The Fallen Idol (1948)
* The Third Man (1949)
* Loser Takes All (1956)
* Saint Joan (1957)
* Our Man in Havana (1959)
* The Comedians (1967)
* Monsignor Quixote (1985)

Adaptations|

* Orient Express (1934)
* The Green Cockatoo (1937)
* This Gun for Hire (1942)
* Went the Day Well? (1942)
* Ministry of Fear (1944)
* The Fugitive (1947)
* The Heart of the Matter (1953)
* The End of the Affair (1955)
* Across the Bridge (1957)
* The Quiet American (1958)
* Travels with My Aunt (1972)
* The Human Factor (1979)
* The Honorary Consul  (1983)
* The End of the Affair (1999)
* The Quiet American (2002)
* Brighton Rock (2010)

Other|

* Brighton Rock (play)
* Shades of Greene

Category

Authority control databases

International|

* ISNI
* VIAF
* FAST
* WorldCat

National|

* Germany
* United States
* France
* BnF data
* Japan
* Italy
* Australia
* Czech Republic
* Spain
* Portugal
* Netherlands
* Norway
* Latvia
* Croatia
* Chile
* Greece
* Argentina
* Korea
* 2
* Sweden
* Poland
* Vatican
* Israel
* Catalonia
* Belgium

Academics|

* CiNii

Artists|

* ULAN
* MusicBrainz
* KulturNav
* FID

People|

* Trove
* Deutsche Biographie
* DDB

Other|

* IdRef
* SNAC
* 2
* Yale LUX

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