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| Birth Name(s) : Graham Greene |
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Full Graham Greene Biography
Henry Graham Greene OM, CH (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) was an English novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenplay writer, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene combined serious literary acclaim with wide popularity.
Greene suffered from bipolar disorder , which had a profound effect on his writing, and drove him to excess in his 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 "nfortunately, the disease is also one's material".
His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Greene (née Raymond), were first cousins, members of a large, influential family that included the Greene King brewery owners, bankers, and businessmen. Charles Greene was Second Master at Berkhamsted School, the headmaster of which was Dr Thomas Fry (also married to a cousin of Charles). Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during World War II.
In 1910, Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster; Graham attended the school. Bullied and profoundly depressed as a boarder, he attempted suicide several times, some, he claimed, by Russian roulette; Michael Shelden's biography discredits that. In 1921, at age 17, he was psychoanalysed for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day boy; school friends included Claud Cockburn and Peter Quennell.
While an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, his first work, a volume of poorly received poetry entitled Babbling April, was published.
After graduating with a second-class degree in history, Greene unsuccessfully took up journalism, first in the city of Nottingham on the Nottingham Journal, and then as a sub-editor on The Times. While in Nottingham he started corresponding with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Roman Catholic convert who had written him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926 (described in A Sort of Life) and was baptised in February the same year. He married Dayrell-Browning in 1927, and they had two children, Lucy (b. 1933) and Francis (b. 1936; d. 1987). In 1948, Greene abandoned Vivien for Catherine Walston, yet remained married to his wife.
Greene's first published novel was The Man Within (1929). Favourable reception emboldened him to quit his sub-editor job at The Times and work as a full-time novelist, however, the next two books were unsuccessful; he later disowned them. His first, true success was Stamboul Train (1932), adapted as the film Orient Express (1934); as with this novel, many of his books would be cinematically adapted.
Throughout his life, Graham Greene travelled far from England, to what he called the world's wild and remote places. The travels allowed him opportunity to spy on behalf of the United Kingdom, in Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet double agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. As a novelist, he wove the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels.
In 1966, Greene moved to Antibes, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known for years, a relationship that endured until his death. In 1981 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society. One of his final works, the pamphlet J'Accuse — The Dark Side of Nice (1982), concerns a legal matter embroiling him and his extended family in Nice. He declared that organized crime flourished in Nice, because the city's upper levels of civic government had protected judicial and police corruption; the accusation provoked a libel lawsuit he lost . Yet, in 1994, he was vindicated — after death — when the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned upon conviction for corruption and associated crimes.
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 the later writings. The supernatural realities that haunted the earlier work declined and was replaced with a humanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching. Left-wing political critiques assumed greater importance in his novels, for example, he attacked the American policy in Vietnam in The Quiet American; the tormented believers portrayed were more likely to have faith in Communism than in Catholicism.
See List of books by Graham Greene for all works.
- Brighton Rock (1938)
- The Power and the Glory (1940)
- The Heart of the Matter (1948)
- The Third Man (1949) (novella, as a basis for the screenplay}
- The End of the Affair (1951)
- The Quiet American (1955)
- The Potting Shed (1957)
- Ways of Escape (1980) (autobiography) |
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