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Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, Stamboul Train. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in Journey Without Maps, and on his return was appointed film critic of the Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote The Lawless Roads and, later, his famous novel The Power and the Glory. Brighton Rock was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel The Heart of the Matter, set in West Africa. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography - A Sort of Life, Ways of Escape and A World of My Own (published posthumously) - two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections Reflections and Mornings in the Dark. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and The Third Man was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.
Mr. Greene's fractional biography - his sort of life is only a part of a life up through the publication of his early, forgotten novels - is a reproof of Auden's overreaching contention that biographies of writers, whether written by others or themselves, are always superfluous and usually in bad taste. It is not superfluous since it prefigures, isolates, and supplements much of the material which will later be part of his works, and he is certainly most discreet in releasing this material from the mortmain of the past. Greene, one of six children of a larger family divided between the rich Greenes and the intellectual Greenes, was a child of many fears and even stronger terrors. His father was a headmaster and he loathed being a student in that school - like the son of a quisling in a country under occupation. His marginal stability manifested itself at various intervals throughout the years: he was sent to an analyst at about sixteen; later in Oxford, while hoping to seduce a governess, he also flirted with a revolver over and over again. His first odd jobs led to a more permanent one with The Times but he was steadily writing a string of novels, unpublished, until finally The Man Within was accepted but success was tenuous for the next ten years. From the beginning he has made clear that he was overshadowed by the knowledge of failure, by awareness of the flawed intention ; indeed hesitation, as well as candor, is implied in the title he has chosen. Perhaps it will not come on strongly enough for those who are not already among Graham Greene's admirers, but most readers will be gratified that he has searched his memory which is like a long broken night. (Kirkus Reviews)
