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Revision as of 22:56, 26 September 2024 editGreenC bot (talk | contribs)Bots2,547,807 edits Rescued 1 archive link. Wayback Medic 2.5 per WP:URLREQ#timesonline.co.uk← Previous edit Revision as of 00:10, 13 October 2024 edit undoGhirlandajo (talk | contribs)Autopatrolled, Extended confirmed users, Pending changes reviewers89,629 edits Early years (1904–1922): as per discussion on WP:RD/HNext edit →
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Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St John's House, a ] of ], 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, ], became ],<ref name="oxforddnb.com" /> and his elder brother, ], an eminent physician and mountaineer.<ref name="timesobit" /> Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St John's House, a ] of ], 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, ], became ],<ref name="oxforddnb.com" /> and his elder brother, ], an eminent physician and mountaineer.<ref name="timesobit" />


His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were ], both members of a large, influential family that included the owners of ], bankers, and statesmen; his mother was cousin to ].{{sfn|Iyer|2012|p=8}} His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were ], both members of a large, influential family that included the owners of ], bankers, and statesmen;{{sfn|Iyer|2012|p=8}} his grandmother Jane Wilson was first cousin to ].<ref>See the article on Graham Greene in ].</ref>

Charles Greene was second master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was ], who was married to Charles' cousin.{{sfn|Sherry|1990|pp=3-4}} Another cousin was the ] ] ], whose politics led to his ] during ].<ref>{{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Jeremy |year=2010 |title=Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family |location=London |url=https://archive.org/details/shadesofgreeneon0000lewi_z4l8 |url-access=registration |publisher=] |pages=216-233, 496-497 |isbn=978-0224079211}}</ref> Charles Greene was second master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was ], who was married to Charles' cousin.{{sfn|Sherry|1990|pp=3-4}} Another cousin was the ] ] ], whose politics led to his ] during ].<ref>{{cite book |last=Lewis |first=Jeremy |year=2010 |title=Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family |location=London |url=https://archive.org/details/shadesofgreeneon0000lewi_z4l8 |url-access=registration |publisher=] |pages=216-233, 496-497 |isbn=978-0224079211}}</ref>



Revision as of 00:10, 13 October 2024

English writer and literary critic (1904–1991) For other people named Graham Greene, see Graham Greene (disambiguation).

Graham Greene
OM CH
Greene in 1975Greene in 1975
BornHenry Graham Greene
(1904-10-02)2 October 1904
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England
Died3 April 1991(1991-04-03) (aged 86)
Vevey, Switzerland
Occupation
  • Writer
  • journalist
Alma materBalliol College, Oxford
Period1925–1991
Genre
Notable works
Spouse Vivien Dayrell-Browning ​ ​(m. 1927; sep. 1947)
PartnerCatherine Walston, Lady Walston (1946–1966)
Yvonne Cloetta (1966–1991)
Children2
RelativesRaymond 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. 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. Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic". He died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery in Switzerland. William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".

Early years (1904–1922)

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. He was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, Hugh, became Director-General of the BBC, and his elder brother, Raymond, an eminent physician and mountaineer.

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; his grandmother Jane Wilson was first cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson.

Charles Greene was second master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry, who was married to Charles' cousin. Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during World War II.

In his childhood, Greene spent his summers at Harston House, the Cambridgeshire home of his uncle, Sir Graham Greene. 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..."

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

Greene contributed several stories to the school magazine, one of which was published by a London evening newspaper 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. In 1925, while he was an undergraduate at Balliol, his first work, a poorly received volume of poetry titled Babbling April, was published.

Greene had periodic bouts of depression while at Oxford, and largely kept to himself. 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." He graduated in 1925 with a second-class degree in history.

Writing career

After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the Nottingham Journal, and then as a sub-editor on The Times. 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. 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". Greene was baptised on 26 February 1926 and they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London.

He published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929; its favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist. Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres (which he described as "entertainments" and "novels"): thrillers—often with notable philosophic edges—such as The Ministry of Fear; and literary works—on which he thought his literary reputation would rest—such as The Power and the Glory.

The next two books, The Name of Action (1930) and Rumour at Nightfall (1932), were unsuccessful, and he later disowned them. His first true success was Stamboul Train (1932) which was taken on by the Book Society and adapted as the film Orient Express, in 1934.

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, 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, which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel. 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.

He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day. Greene's 1937 film review 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"—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs, and Greene left the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over. While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory.

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

As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between his 'entertainments' and novels increasingly problematic. The last book Greene termed an entertainment was Our Man in Havana in 1958.

Greene also wrote short stories and plays, which were well received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist. His first play, The Living Room, debuted in 1953.

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.

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

Travel and espionage

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. Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944. Greene later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War. Greene 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.

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.

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

In 1954, Greene travelled to Haiti, where The Comedians (1966) is set, 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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."

Publishing career

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

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

Personal life

Greene was an agnostic, but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 after meeting his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning. They were married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, north London. The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936).

In his discussions with Father Trollope, 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", 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. Late in life, Greene called himself a "Catholic agnostic".

Beginning in 1946, Greene had an affair with Catherine Walston, the wife of Harry Walston, a wealthy farmer and future life peer. 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. Greene left his family in 1947, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching, and they remained married until Greene's death in 1991.

Greene lived with manic depression (bipolar disorder). He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life. In a letter to his wife, Vivien, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life," and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".

Final years

Gravestone at Corseaux, Switzerland

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

He lived the last years of his life in Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the same town Charlie Chaplin was living in at this time. He visited Chaplin often, and the two were good friends. His book Doctor Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1980) is based on themes of combined philosophical and geographical influences. 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.

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

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. 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 has nothing to do with nukes, but with the body hanging around while the mind departs."

In 1986, Greene was awarded Britain's Order of Merit. He died of leukaemia in 1991 at the age of 86, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery.

Writing style and themes

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

Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres: thrillers (mystery and suspense books), such as The Ministry of Fear, which he described as entertainments, often with notable philosophic edges; and literary works, such as The Power and the Glory, which he described as novels, on which he thought his literary reputation was to be based.

As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between "entertainments" and "novels" to be less evident. The last book Greene termed an entertainment was Our Man in Havana in 1958. When Travels with My Aunt was published eleven years later, many reviewers noted that Greene had designated it a novel, even though, as a work decidedly comic in tone, it appeared closer to his last two entertainments, Loser Takes All and Our Man in Havana, than to any of the novels. Greene, they speculated, seemed to have dropped the category of entertainment. This was soon confirmed. In the Collected Edition of Greene's works published in 22 volumes between 1970 and 1982, the distinction between novels and entertainments is no longer maintained. All are novels.

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. The Internet Movie Database lists 66 titles between 1934 and 2010 based on Greene material. Some novels were filmed more than once, such as Brighton Rock in 1947 and 2011, The End of the Affair in 1955 and 1999, and The Quiet American in 1958 and 2002. The 1936 thriller A Gun for Sale was filmed at least five times under different titles, notably This Gun for Hire in 1942. Greene received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol (1948), adapted from his own short story The Basement Room. He also wrote several original screenplays. 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. 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. Author and screenwriter Michael Korda contributed a foreword and introduction to this novel in a commemorative edition.

In 2009, The Strand Magazine began to publish in serial form a newly discovered Greene novel titled The Empty Chair. The manuscript was written in longhand when Greene was 22 and newly converted to Catholicism.

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". 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". 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". 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. 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.

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

The novels often portray the dramatic struggles of the individual soul from a Catholic perspective. Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction—in the world, sin is omnipresent to the degree that the vigilant struggle to avoid sinful conduct is doomed to failure, hence not central to holiness. His friend and fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of the Quietist heresy. This aspect of his work also was criticised by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, as giving sin a mystique. Greene responded that constructing a vision of pure faith and goodness in the novel was beyond his talents. Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view by Edward Short is in Crisis Magazine, and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by Joseph Pearce.

Catholicism's prominence decreased in his later writings. The supernatural realities that haunted the earlier work declined and were replaced by a humanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching.

In his later years, Greene was a strong critic of American imperialism and sympathised with the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met. 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. In Ways of Escape, reflecting on his Mexican trip, he complained that Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing compared with Cuba's. In Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows".

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

— Graham Greene

In April 1949, when the New Statesman held a contest for parodies of Greene's writing style, he submitted three entries under the names "M. Wilkinson", “N. Wilkinson" and "D.R. Cook". As "M. Wilkinson", he shared the prize (one guinea) with four other authors. He later wrote to the magazine revealing his identity and expressing regret that his other two entries had not won, "because prize money in these days is free of Income Tax." Greene's entry comprised the first two paragraphs of a novel, apparently set in Italy, The Stranger's Hand: An Entertainment. Greene's friend Mario Soldati, a Piedmontese novelist and film director, 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. Apparently he lost interest in the project, leaving it as a substantial fragment that was published posthumously in The Graham Greene Film Reader (1993) and No Man's Land (2005). A script for The Stranger's Hand was written by Guy Elmes on the basis of Greene's unfinished story, and filmed by Soldati in 1954. In 1965, Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition pseudonymously, and won an honourable mention.

Legacy

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

Acclaimed during his lifetime, Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. In 1961 and 1966 he was among the final three candidates for the prize. In 1967, Greene was again among the final three choices, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary in 2017. The committee also considered Jorge Luis Borges and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with the latter the chosen winner. 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.

Greene collected several literary awards for his novels, including the 1941 Hawthornden Prize for The Power and the Glory and the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter. As an author, he received the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize, a biennial literary award given to writers whose works have dealt with themes of human freedom in society. In 1986, he was awarded Britain's Order of Merit.

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 northwest 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.

He is the subject of the 2013 documentary film, Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene.

His short story "The Destructors" was featured in the 2001 film Donnie Darko.

Select works

Main article: Graham Greene bibliography

References

Citations

  1. ^ Diemert, Brian (27 August 1996). Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s. McGill-Queen's Press. p. 5. ISBN 9780773566170.
  2. ^ Diemert, Brian (27 August 1996). Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s. McGill-Queen's Press. p. 183. ISBN 9780773566170.
  3. ^ Neuman, Ricki (3 January 2012). "Graham Greene var nära Nobelpris 1961". Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish).
  4. ^ "Nomination archive: Graham Greene".
  5. ^ Steensma, Robert C. (1997). Encyclopedia of the Essay. Taylor & Francis. p. 264. ISBN 9781884964305.
  6. ^ Donaghy, Henry J. (1983). Graham Greene, an Introduction to His Writings. Rodopi. p. 13. ISBN 9062035353.
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ Graham Greene, The Major Novels: A Centenary Archived 27 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine by Kevin McGowin, Eclectica Magazine
  9. ^ "Graham Greene finds no Swiss cuckoo clocks". Swissinfo.ch. 19 May 2006. Archived from the original on 22 February 2014. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. ^ Michael Shelden, 'Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2008 accessed 15 May 2011
  13. ^ "Obituaries: Graham Greene". The Times. No. 63983. 4 April 1991. p. 16.
  14. Iyer 2012, p. 8.
  15. See the article on Graham Greene in ODNB.
  16. Sherry 1990, pp. 3–4.
  17. Lewis, Jeremy (2010). Shades of Greene: One Generation of an English Family. London: Jonathan Cape. pp. 216–233, 496–497. ISBN 978-0224079211.
  18. Greene 1971, pp. 23–24.
  19. Sherry 1990, p. 52.
  20. Greene 1971, pp. 24–25.
  21. Iyer 2012, p. 9.
  22. Sherry 1990, p. 110.
  23. Sherry 1990, pp. 113–114.
  24. Greene 1971, p. 110.
  25. ^ "Graham Greene Biography". notablebiographies.com. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
  26. "Graham Greene". Biogs.com. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  27. ^ "Obituary: Graham Greene". The Daily Telegraph. No. 42231. 4 April 1991. p. 21.
  28. Sherry 1990, p. 179.
  29. Greene 1971, pp. 164–165.
  30. Sherry 1990, p. 442.
  31. ""Orient Express." AFI Catalog". Retrieved 20 August 2024.
  32. Bosco, Mark (21 January 2005). Graham Greene's Catholic Imagination. Oxford University Press. p. 3. ISBN 9780198039358.
  33. "Graham Greene's infamous review of Wee Willie Winkie (1937), starring Shirley Temple". The Charnel-House. 26 February 2014. Retrieved 4 December 2014.
  34. Atkinson, Michael (21 August 2009). "Our Man in London". movingimagesource.us.
  35. Chancellor, Alexander (22 February 2014). "Was Graham Greene right about Shirley Temple?". The Spectator.
  36. ^ Johnson, Andrew (18 November 2007). "Shirley Temple scandal was real reason Graham Greene fled to Mexico". The Independent.
  37. 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.
  38. 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.
  39. 13 Must-Read Graham Greene Books earlybirdbooks.com, accessed 31 October 2020
  40. Billington, Michael (13 March 2013). "The Living Room—review". The Guardian. London.
  41. Korda, Michael (1999). Another Life: A Memoir of Other People. United States: Random House. pp. 312–325. ISBN 0-679-45659-7.
  42. Korda, Michael (11 July 1999). "Another Life: A Memoir of Other People Interview". www.booknotes.org. C-Span. Retrieved 30 December 2016.
  43. Miller, R. H. (1990). Understanding Graham Greene. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press. ISBN 0-87249-704-6.
  44. Pendleton, Robert (1996). Graham Greene's Conradian Masterplot. Suffolk: MacMillan Press. ISBN 0-333-62888-8.
  45. Diemert, Brian (1996). Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-1432-5.
  46. Christopher Hawtree. "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys". The Guardian, 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011.
  47. Robert Royal (November 1999). "The (Mis)Guided Dream of Graham Greene". First Things. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  48. "BBC—BBC Four Documentaries—Arena: Graham Greene". BBC News. 3 October 2004. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  49. Brennan, Michael G. (18 March 2010). Graham Greene: Fictions, Faith and Authorship. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 978-1-4411-3742-5.
  50. 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)
  51. "The Spy Who Wrote Me Burns Lands Graham Greene Correspondence With Soviet Agent." Boston College Chronicle, Volume 8, Number 4, 14 October 1999.
  52. "Graham Greene, 86, Dies; Novelist of the Soul". The New York Times. 4 April 1991. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
  53. Sunil Iyengar (13 January 2021). "Our Man in the Stacks". Los Angeles Review of Books. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
  54. 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
  55. Graham Greene, Uneasy Catholic Times Literary Supplement, 22 August 2006.
  56. "EUROPE | Vatican's bid to censure Graham Greene". BBC News. 3 November 2000. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  57. Paul Theroux (1 January 2004). Introduction to The Comedians. Random House. p. v. ISBN 9780099478379.
  58. Diederich, Bernard (2012). Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America 1954–1983. Peter Owen.
  59. Duncan Campbell (17 December 2005). "Drinking, dancing and death". The Guardian.
  60. Greene, Graham (1961). A Burnt-Out Case. New York (Amer. ed.): The Viking Press. p. vii–viii.
  61. Neave, Airey (1970). The Escape Room. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. pp. 126–127.
  62. ^ Miller, Tom (14 April 1991). "Sex, Spies and Literature; Graham Greene's Cuba: Helping Fidel Was the Heart of the Matter". Washington Post.
  63. Sherry, Norman (4 April 1991). "Obituary: Graham Greene". The Independent. No. 1394. p. 3.
  64. Greene, Richard (2011). Graham Greene: A Life in Letters.
  65. Sherry 1994, pp. 189–90, 200–204.
  66. Hill, Mike (2015). The Works of Graham Greene, Volume 2: A Guide to the Graham Greene Archives. p. 33.
  67. ^ Joseph Pearce. "Graham Greene: Doubter Par Excellence", CatholicAuthors.com. Retrieved 7 January 2011.
  68. The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990. Introduction by John Updike, p. xiv.
  69. 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.
  70. 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.
  71. 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.
  72. Sherry 1994, pp. 275–276.
  73. Sherry 1994, pp. 283–287.
  74. Sherry 2004, p. 252.
  75. Thorpe, Vanessa (9 August 1998). "Graham Greene Bipolar". The Independent.
  76. "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.
  77. "Graham Greene: A Life In Letters – Book Reviews – Books – Entertainment". Sydney Morning Herald. 30 November 2007. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  78. Jordison, Sam (15 June 2012). "Reading group: Travels with My Aunt and the many shades of Greene". The Guardian. Retrieved 16 May 2022.
  79. ^ Caterson, John. "Greene, Graham (1904-1991)". Screenonline. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
  80. ^ "The Jerusalem Prize | Previous Winners". jbookforum.com. Retrieved 20 August 2024.
  81. Sherry 2004, pp. 691, 695.
  82. Eder, Richard (5 February 1982). "On the Riviera, A Morality Tale by Graham Greene". archive.nytimes.com.
  83. Randall, Colin (4 April 1991). "Homage paid to Graham Greene". The Daily Telegraph. No. 42231. p. 1.
  84. Whitney, Craig R. (19 November 1998). "Jacques Medecin, 70, Dies; French Mayor". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 August 2024.
  85. Sherry 2004, pp. 654–655.
  86. ^ Vinocur, John (3 March 1985). "The Soul-Searching Continues for Graham Greene: The celebrated writer; whose new book is a long-forgotten novella , still dwells on doubt and failure". New York Times Magazine. New York.
  87. "Greene, Graham | Authors | guardian.co.uk Books". London: Books.guardian.co.uk. 22 July 2008. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  88. "The 22nd Academy Awards | 1950". www.oscars.org. 3 October 2014. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
  89. Angelini, Sergio. "Fallen Idol, The (1948)". Screenonline. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
  90. Canby, Vincent (30 September 1983). "Film: 'Beyond the Limit,' From Graham Greene". The New York Times. Retrieved 13 September 2024.
  91. "The Improbable Spy". Vqronline.org. Archived from the original on 20 November 2008. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  92. "First Things". Angelfire.com. 9 October 2004. Archived from the original on 11 November 2009. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
  93. ^ The Catholic Novels of Graham Greene, Crisis Magazine, May 2005.
  94. "Regions of the Mind: The Exoticism of Greeneland". Dur.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 18 April 2009. Retrieved 2 June 2010.
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  96. Liukkonen, Petri. "Graham Greene". Books and Writers. Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 27 July 2005.
  97. 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.
  98. ^ P.xii of John Updike's introduction to The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990.
  99. Sexton, James, ed. (2005). Graham Greene: No Man's Land. London: Hesperus. pp. xxiii–xxiv. ISBN 1-84391-414-X.
  100. Irving, John. The Imaginary Girlfriend. New York, Ballantine Books, 2002, p. 31.
  101. Dale, Brown, W. (1997). Of fiction and faith : twelve American writers talk about their vision and work. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. ISBN 0802843131. OCLC 36994237.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  102. Diemert, Brian (1996). Graham Greene's Thrillers and the 1930s. McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. p. 179. ISBN 9780773514331.
  103. Thomson, Ian (3 October 2004). "More Sherry trifles". The Observer.
  104. Kohn, Lynette (1961). Graham Greene: The Major Novels. Stanford University Press. p. 23.
  105. Schueler, Kaj (January 2018). "Hemliga dokument visar kampen om Nobelpriset". Svenska Dagbladet. Retrieved 3 January 2018.
  106. Carter, David (28 March 2013). How to Win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Hesperus Press. p. 22. ISBN 9781780940403.
  107. Feldman, Burton (3 October 2001). The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige. Arcade Publishing. p. 96. ISBN 9781559705370.
  108. Markham, James M. (7 October 1983). "Briton Wins the Nobel Literature Prize". The New York Times.
  109. "Previous winners of the Hawthornden Prize". hawthornden.org. Retrieved 15 May 2024.
  110. "The James Tait Black Prizes | Fiction Winners". ed.ac.uk. 26 July 2023. Retrieved 16 May 2024.
  111. "Book Prizes Awarded". The Times. No. 51288. 25 January 1949. p. 2.
  112. Sherry 2004, p. 483.
  113. "Home". Graham Greene. Retrieved 11 March 2016.
  114. Jones, Kimberley (30 April 2013). "DVD Watch: 'Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene'". Austin Chronicle. Retrieved 24 October 2014.
  115. French, Philip (27 October 2002). "Into the heart of Darko". The Guardian. Retrieved 15 May 2024.

Works cited

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)
  • 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.

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