Greene, (Henry) Graham

Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–91), novelist and playwright, was educated at Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster, then at Balliol College, Oxford. He joined the Roman Catholic Church in 1926, married in 1927, and was from 1926 to 1930 on the staff of The Times. His first three novels (1929–31) made little impression, but Stamboul Train (1932) sold well and was followed by many increasingly successful novels, short stories, books of reportage and travel, plays, children's books, etc. Greene describes his own early years in A Sort of Life (1971), which gives a vivid impression of a manic depressive temperament tempted by deadly nightshade and Russian roulette, and a literary imagination nourished by influences as diverse as Weyman, M. Bowen, and R. Browning.

His pursuit of danger (despite quieter interludes, e.g. as literary editor on the Spectator and Night and Day) dominated much of his life and travels, as described in his second volume of autobiography, Ways of Escape (1980). His novels include England Made Me (1935); The Power and the Glory (1940); The Heart of the Matter (1948); The End of the Affair (1951; a wartime love affair with strong religious-supernatural touches modified by Greene in a later version); The Quiet American (1955, set in Vietnam); A Burnt-Out Case (1961, set in a leper colony in the Congo); The Honorary Consul (1973, set in Argentina); and The Human Factor (1978, a secret service novel). Other works of fiction he classed as ‘entertainments’: these include Brighton Rock (1938, paradoxically the first novel in which critics detected a strong Catholic message, not surprisingly, in view of the fact that it introduces what was to be his central concept of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’); The Confidential Agent (1939); Loser Takes All (1955); Our Man in Havana (1958); and The Third Man (1950, originally written as a screenplay; filmed by Carol Reed, 1949) (see Expressionism).

Greene's plays include The Living Room (1953), The Potting Shed (1957), and The Complaisant Lover (1959). He also published travel books, describing journeys in Liberia (Journey without Maps, 1936), Mexico (The Lawless Roads, 1939), and Africa (In Search of a Character: Two African Journals, 1961). His Collected Essays appeared in 1969. His range as a writer is wide, both geographically and in variations of tone, but his preoccupations with moral dilemma (personal, religious, and political), his attempts to distinguish ‘good-or-evil’ from ‘right-or-wrong’, and his persistent choice of ‘seedy’ (a word which he was to regret popularizing) locations give his work a highly distinctive and recognizable quality, while his skilful variations of popular forms (the thriller, the detective story) have brought him a rare combination of critical and popular admiration.