Henry Green

Henry Green pseud. of Henry Vincent Yorke, 1905-73, English novelist. Born to an aristocratic family, he was the longtime managing director of his family's industrial engineering business in London. His nine novels, with laconic titles such as Party Going (1939), Nothing (1950), and Doting (1952), are as brilliantly original as they are tantalizing and enigmatic. Viewing human failures and inadequacies in an essentially comic light, Green achieves his unique effects through techniques normally reserved for poetry, relying on allusion, symbolism, and imagery. His most representative works are Living (1929), Caught (1943), Loving (1945), and Concluding (1948). A number of Green's short stories were published posthumously in Surviving (1992).

Bibliography: See his memoir Pack My Bag (1952); J. Treglown, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green (2001); study by R. S. Ryf (1967).

Green, Henry (1905–73), novelist and industrialist, was born Henry Vincent Yorke. His first novel, Blindness (1926), was published while he was an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, when, in his aesthete phase, he was a contemporary of E. Waugh and H. Acton. Living (1929) describes life on the factory floor in Birmingham, and is based on his own experiences working for the family firm, H. Pontifex and Sons. It manifests the idiosyncracies of prose—dropped articles, sentences without verbs, a highly individual use of colloquial language in both narrative and dialogue—which contribute to his work's distinctive quality. His other works include Party Going (1939); Caught (1943); Loving (1945), which describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during wartime; Back (1946); Concluding (1948); Nothing (1950); and Doting (1952).