Graham Greene Biography - life, childhood, children, parents, name, story, death, history, school, book, information, born Graham Greene Biography Vevey, Switzerland English author, novelist, and dramatist The works of the English writer Graham Greene explore issues of right and wrong in modern society, and often feature exotic settings in different parts of the world. Childhood Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, in England. He was one of six children born to Charles Henry Greene, headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and Marion R. Greene, whose first cousin was the famed writer Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894). He did not enjoy his childhood, and often skipped classes in order to avoid the constant bullying by his fellow classmates. At one point Greene even ran away from home. When Greene began suffering from mental and emotional problems, his parents sent Graham Greene. AP/Wide World Photos . him to London for psychotherapy (the treatment of a mentally or emotionally disturbed person through verbal communication) by a student of the famous Sigmund Freud (1856–1939).

While he was living there, Greene developed his love for literature and began to write poetry. Writers Ezra Pound (1885–1972) and Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) became lifelong mentors (teachers) to him before he returned to high school. After graduating in 1922, Greene went on to Oxford University's Balliol College. There, Greene amused himself with travel as well as spending six weeks as a member of the Communist Party, a political party that supports communism, a system of government in which the goods and services of a country are owned and distributed by the government. Though he quickly abandoned his Communist beliefs, Greene later wrote sympathetic profiles of Communist leaders Fidel Castro (1926–) and Ho Chi Minh (1890–1969). Despite all these efforts to distract himself from his studies, he graduated from Oxford in 1925 with a second-class pass in history, and a poorly received volume of poetry with the title Babbling April.

Writing career In 1926 he began his professional writing career as an unpaid apprentice (working in order to learn a trade) for the Nottingham Journal, moving on later to the London Times. The experience was a positive one for him, and he held his position as an assistant editor until the publication of his first novel, The Man Within (1929). Here he began to develop the characteristic themes he later pursued so effectively: betrayal, pursuit, and death. His next works, Name of Action (1931) and Rumour at Nightfall (1931), were not well received by critics, but Greene regained their respect with the first book he classed as an entertainment piece. Called Stamboul Train in England, it was published in 1932 in the United States as Orient Express. The story revolves around a group of travellers on a train, the Orient Express, a mysterious setting that allowed the author to develop his strange characters with drama and suspense.

Twelve years after Greene converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, he published Brighton Rock (1938), a novel with a highly dramatic and suspenseful plot full of sexual and violent imagery that explored the interplay between abnormal behavior and morality, the quality of good conduct. The Confidential Agent was published in 1939, as was the work The Lawless Roads, a journal of Greene's travels in Mexico in 1938. Here he had seen widespread persecution (poor treatment) of Catholic priests, which he documented in his journal along with a description of a drunken priest's execution (public killing). The incident made such an impression upon him that this victim became the hero of The Power and the Glory, the novel Greene considers to be his best. Later life During the years of World War II (1939–45: when Germany, Italy, and Japan fought against France, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States [from 1941 until the end of the war]) Greene slipped out of England and went to West Africa as a secret intelligence (gathering secret information) officer for the British government.

The result, a novel called The Heart of the Matter, appeared in 1948, and was well received by American readers. Steadily, Greene produced a series of works that received both praise and criticism. He was considered for the Nobel Prize for Literature but never won the award. Still, many other honors were given to him, including the Companion of Honor award by Queen Elizabeth in 1966, and the Order of Merit, a much higher honor, in 1986. In 1990 Greene was stricken with an unspecified blood disease, which weakened him so much that he moved from his home in Antibes, the South of France, to Vevey, Switzerland, to be closer to his daughter. He lingered until the beginning of spring, then died on April 3, 1991, in La Povidence Hospital in Vevey, Switzerland. For More Information Greene, Graham. Graham Greene: Man of Paradox. Edited by A. F. Cassis. Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1994. Shelden, Michael. Graham Greene: The Enemy Within. New York: Random House, 1994. Sherry, Norman.

The Life of Graham Greene. New York: Viking, 1989. User Contributions: Graham Greene | British author | Britannica.com British author Alternative Title: Henry Graham Greene Graham Greene Robert Louis Stevenson Graham Greene, in full Henry Graham Greene (born October 2, 1904, Berkhamsted , Hertfordshire , England —died April 3, 1991, Vevey, Switzerland ), English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist whose novels treat life’s moral ambiguities in the context of contemporary political settings. Graham Greene, 1969. Yousuf Karsh His father was the headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended for some years. After running away from school, he was sent to London to a psychoanalyst in whose house he lived while under treatment. After studying at Balliol College, Oxford, Greene converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926, partly through the influence of his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he married in 1927. He moved to London and worked for The Times as a copy editor from 1926 to 1930.

His first published work was a book of verse, Babbling April (1925), and upon the modest success of his first novel , The Man Within (1929; adapted as the film The Smugglers, 1947), he quit The Times and worked as a film critic and literary editor for The Spectator until 1940. He then traveled widely for much of the next three decades as a freelance journalist, searching out locations for his novels in the process. Greene’s first three novels are held to be of small account. He began to come into his own with a thriller, Stamboul Train (1932; also published as Orient Express), which plays off various characters against each other as they ride a train from the English Channel to Istanbul. This was the first of a string of novels that he termed “ entertainments,” works similar to thrillers in their spare, tough language and their suspenseful, swiftly moving plots, but possessing greater moral complexity and depth. Stamboul Train was also the first of Greene’s many novels to be filmed (1934).

It was followed by three more entertainments that were equally popular with the reading public: A Gun for Sale (1936; also published as This Gun for Hire; films 1942 and, as Short Cut to Hell, 1957), The Confidential Agent (1939; film 1945), and The Ministry of Fear (1943; adapted as the film Ministry of Fear, 1945). A fifth entertainment, The Third Man, which was published in novel form in 1949, was originally a screenplay for a classic film directed by Carol Reed . One of Greene’s finest novels, Brighton Rock (1938; films 1947 and 2010), shares some elements with his entertainments—the protagonist is a hunted criminal roaming the underworld of an English sea resort—but explores the contrasting moral attitudes of its main characters with a new degree of intensity and emotional involvement. In this book, Greene contrasts a cheerful and warm-hearted humanist he obviously dislikes with a corrupt and violent teenage criminal whose tragic situation is intensified by a Roman Catholic upbringing.

Greene’s finest novel, The Power and the Glory (1940; also published as The Labyrinthine Ways; adapted as the film The Fugitive, 1947), has a more directly Catholic theme: the desperate wanderings of a priest who is hunted down in rural Mexico at a time when the church is outlawed there. The weak and alcoholic priest tries to fulfill his priestly duties despite the constant threat of death at the hands of a revolutionary government. Britannica Stories Ringling Bros. Folds Its Tent Greene worked for the Foreign Office during World War II and was stationed for a while at Freetown, Sierra Leone , the scene of another of his best-known novels, The Heart of the Matter (1948; film 1953). This book traces the decline of a kindhearted British colonial officer whose pity for his wife and mistress eventually leads him to commit suicide. The End of the Affair (1951; films 1955 and 1999) is narrated by an agnostic in love with a woman who forsakes him because of a religious conviction that brings her near to sainthood.

British Culture and Politics Greene’s next four novels were each set in a different Third World nation on the brink of political upheaval. The protagonist of A Burnt-Out Case (1961) is a Roman Catholic architect tired of adulation who meets a tragic end in the Belgian Congo shortly before that colony reaches independence. The Quiet American (1956; films 1958 and 2002) chronicles the doings of a well-intentioned American government agent in Vietnam in the midst of the anti-French uprising there in the early 1950s. Our Man in Havana (1958; film 1959) is set in Cuba just before the communist revolution there, while The Comedians (1966; film 1967) is set in Haiti during the rule of François Duvalier .

Greene’s last four novels, The Honorary Consul (1973; adapted as the film Beyond the Limit, 1983), The Human Factor (1978; film 1979), Monsignor Quixote (1982), and The Tenth Man (1985), represent a decline from the level of his best fiction. Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies The world Greene’s characters inhabit is a fallen one, and the tone of his works emphasizes the presence of evil as a palpable force. His novels display a consistent preoccupation with sin and moral failure acted out in seedy locales characterized by danger, violence, and physical decay. Greene’s chief concern is the moral and spiritual struggles within individuals, but the larger political and social settings of his novels give such conflicts an enhanced resonance . His early novels depict a shabby Depression-stricken Europe sliding toward fascism and war, while many of his subsequent novels are set in remote locales undergoing wars, revolutions, or other political upheavals.

Despite the downbeat tone of much of his subject matter, Greene was in fact one of the most widely read British novelists of the 20th century. His books’ unusual popularity is due partly to his production of thrillers featuring crime and intrigue but more importantly to his superb gifts as a storyteller, especially his masterful selection of detail and his use of realistic dialogue in a fast-paced narrative. Throughout his career, Greene was fascinated by film, and he often emulated cinematic techniques in his writing. No other British writer of this period was as aware as Greene of the power and influence of cinema. Greene published several collections of short stories, among them Nineteen Stories (1947; revised as Twenty-one Stories, 1954). Among his plays are The Living Room (performed 1952) and The Potting Shed (1957). His Collected Essays appeared in 1969. A Sort of Life (1971) is a memoir to 1931, to which Ways of Escape (1980) is a sequel.

In J’accuse (1982) Greene denounced a family friend’s former husband and showed evidence of government corruption in the French city of Nice . A collection of his film criticism is available in Mornings in the Dark: The Graham Greene Film Reader (1993). In 2007 a selection of his letters was published as Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. The unfinished manuscript The Empty Chair, a murder mystery that Greene began writing in 1926, was discovered in 2008; serialization of it began the following year. More about Graham Greene Graham Greene Books - Biography and List of Works - Author of '19 Stories' Home > Authors > Graham Greene books Graham Greene Henry Greene -by-greene-graham/work/379878' >Graham Greene, OM (October 2, 1904- April 3, 1991) was a prolific English novelist, playwright, short story writer and critic whose works explore the ambiguities of modern man and ambivalent moral or political issues in a contemporary setting.

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a mere "Catholic novelist", his religion informs most of his novels, and many of his best works (e.g. The Power and the Glory) are explicitly Roman Catholic in content and preoccupations. Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the fourth of six children- his younger brother Hugh was later to become the Director-General of the BBC, and older brother Raymond was an eminent doctor and mountaineer. Their parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion nee Raymond, were first cousins and members of a large and influential family which included the owners of the Greene King brewery, and various bankers and businessmen. Charles Greene was "second master" at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry (who was married to another cousin of Charles). In 1910, Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster of the school, and Graham attended the school as a pupil.

Bullied and profoundly unhappy as a boarder, Greene made several attempts at suicide (some of them purportedly by playing Russian roulette- though Michael Shelden's biography of Greene persuasively discredits the truth of these incidents), and in 1921 at the age of seventeen he underwent six months of psychoanalysis in London to deal with depression. After this he returned to the school as a day boy, living with his family. Schoolfriends included Claud Cockburn and Peter Quennell. He went to Balliol College, Oxford, and his first work (a volume of poetry) was published in 1925, while he was an undergraduate, but it was not widely praised. Early career After graduation, Greene took up a career in journalism, firstly in Nottingham (a city which recurs in his novels as an epitome of mean provincial life), and then as a subeditor on The Times. While in Nottingham he started a correspondence with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Roman Catholic who had written to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene converted to the faith in 1926, and the couple were married the following year.

They had two children, Lucy (born 1933) and Francis (born 1936). In 1948 Greene left Vivien for Catherine Walston, but they remained married. Novels and other works Greene's first published novel was Stamboul Train in 1932- as with several of his subsequent books, this was also adapted as a film (Orient Express, 1934). His income from novels was supplemented by freelance journalism, including book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day, which closed down in 1937 shortly after Greene's review of the film Wee Willie Winkie, starring a nine-year-old Shirley Temple, caused the magazine to lose a libel case. Greene's review claimed that Temple displayed "a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men", and is now seen as one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of young children by the entertainment industry. His fiction was originally divided into two genres: thrillers or mystery/suspense books, such as The Power and The Glory , on which his reputation was thought to be based.

As his career lengthened, however, Greene and his readers both found the "entertainments" to be of nearly as high a value as the literary efforts, and Greene's later efforts such as The Quiet American combine these modes into works of remarkable insight and compression. Writing style Greene's novels are written in a contemporary, realistic style, often featuring characters troubled by self-doubt and living in seedy or rootless circumstances. The doubts were often of a religious nature, echoing the author's ambiguous attitude to Catholicism (by the end of his life he seems to have lost his faith, but still considered himself a Catholic). Unlike other "Catholic writers" such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, Greene's politics were essentially left-leaning, though some biographers believe politics mattered little to him. In his later years he was a strong critic of what he saw as American imperialism, and he supported the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met. Travel Throughout his life, Greene was obsessed with travelling far from his native England, to what he called the "wild and remote" places of the world. His travels provided him with opportunities to engage in espionage on behalf of the United Kingdom (in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, for example).

Greene had been recruited to MI6 by the notorious double agent Kim Philby. He reworked the colorful and exciting characters and places he encountered into the fabric of his novels. A 1938 trip to Mexico to see the effects of a campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was funded by the Roman Catholic Church. This resulted in the factual Power and the Glory, often considered to be Greene's finest novel. Ironically, the novel was condemned by the Vatican in 1953. "There is so much weariness and disappointment in travel that people have to open up- in railway trains, over a fire, on the decks of steamers, and in the palm courts of hotels on a rainy day. They have to pass the time somehow, and they can pass it only with themselves. Like the characters in Chekhov they have no reserves – you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances." Many of his books have been filmed, most notably 1947's Brighton Rock , and he also wrote several original screenplays, most famously for the film The Third Man .

Trivia Greene greatly enjoyed parody. In 1949, when the New Statesman publication held a contest for parodies of Greene's distinctive writing style, he submitted an entry under a pseudonym and won second prize. The resulting work, The Stranger's Hand, was later finished by another writer and brought to the screen by Italian film director, Mario Soldati. In 1965, Greene entered a similar New Statesman parody contest, again under a pseudonym, and won an honorable mention. Final years Greene moved to Antibes in 1966, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known for several years, and this relationship endured until his death. In the last years of his life, Greene lived in the small resort city of Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. In 1981 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to writers concerned with 'the freedom of the individual in society'. One of his final works, J'Accuse-The Dark Side of Nice, (1982), concerns a legal matter that he and his family were embroiled in while he lived in Nice. This led to a libel case in France, which he lost.

On his death in 1991 at the age of 86, he was interred in the nearby cemetery in Corsier-sur-Vevey. October 2004 saw the publication of the third and final volume of The Life of Graham Greene by Norman Sherry, Greene's official biographer. The writing of this biography created a story in itself in that Sherry followed in Greene's footsteps, even coming down with diseases that Greene had come down with in the same place. Sherry's work reveals that Greene continued to submit reports to British intelligence until the end of his life. This has led scholars and Greene's reading public to entertain the provocative question, "Was Greene a novelist who was also a spy, or was his lifelong literary career the perfect cover? Graham Greene books Facts about Graham Greene - The Meaning Of The Name The Meaning Of The Name Toggle navigation Gender: Male Occupation: Actor For privacy reasons, we cannot provide the meaning of this celebrity's name! Instead, please find the Numerology Interpretation for that name. The Growth number corresponding to this first name is 3. Interpretation: Learn more with our free Numerology Tool Which stars are celebrating their birthday today? Check our and find out celebrities born on your birthday.

Biography Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and author regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene had acquired a reputation early in his own lifetime as a great writer, both of serious Catholic novels and of thrillers (or "entertainments " as he termed them); however, even though shortlisted in 1967, he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Through 67 years of writings which included over 25 novels, he explored the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world through a Catholic perspective. 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 the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair; which are regarded as "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel.

Several works such as The Confidential Agent, The Third Man, The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage. Greene was born into a large, influential family that included the owners of the Greene King Brewery. He was born in and boarded at Berkhamsted School in Hertfordshire, England, where his father taught and became head master. He was unhappy at the school, and attempted suicide several times. He went up to Balliol College, Oxford to study history, where while an undergraduate he published his first work in 1925, a poorly received volume of poetry, Babbling April. After graduating Greene worked for a period of time as a private tutor and then turned to journalism – first on the Nottingham Journal, and then as a sub-editor on The Times. He converted to Catholicism in 1926, after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning. He published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929; favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist. He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews.

His 1937 film review of Wee Willie Winkie, for the British journal Night and Day, which commented on the nine-year-old star, Shirley Temple's sexuality, provoked Twentieth Century Fox to sue, which prompted Greene to live in Mexico until after the trial was over. While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel considered his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory. Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres: thrillers 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. Greene suffered from bipolar disorder, 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". William Golding described Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety." He died in 1991 at age 86 of leukaemia and was buried in Corseaux cemetery.

The section "Biography" of this page contains content from the copyrighted Wikipedia article " Graham Greene "; that content is used under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) . You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL. Graham Greene, 86, Dies; Novelist of the Soul Graham Greene, 86, Dies; Novelist of the Soul By THE NEW YORK TIMES raham Greene, the British author whose novels of suspense and moral ambiguity plumbed the sordid politics of the modern world and the inner torments of mankind, died yesterday at La Providence Hospital in Vevey, near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He was 86 years old. The official cause of death was not immediately known, but his daughter, Caroline Bourget, told Reuters that her father died of a blood disease. Mr. Greene lived in an apartment in Antibes, France, but had traveled all over the world in search of subject matter during his 60-year writing career. Among Mr.

Greene's 24 novels, many of which were adapted into films, were "The Power and the Glory," "The Heart of the Matter," "The Third Man," "The Quiet American," "Our Man in Havana," "The Comedians," "The Honorary Consul" and "The Human Factor." 27 Languages, 20 Million Copies His plays included "The Living Room," "The Potting Shed" and "The Complaisant Lover," and he wrote dozens of short stories. His work was translated into 27 languages and sold more than 20 million copies in hard-cover and paperback editions. He also wrote travel books, essays and children's stories, and two autobiographies, "A Sort of Life" and "Ways of Escape." An occasional contributor to newspapers and magazines, he even found time to write strong letters to the editor on political and literary matters. That Mr. Greene never received the Nobel Prize in Literature was a source of regret and astonishment to many readers and publishing professionals. In his outspoken comments on world affairs in fiction and in fact -- including criticism of American military intervention in Vietnam and in Central America -- Mr.

Greene felt an obligation to express his views first and foremost as a moralist. He was a convert to Catholicism but not, he asserted, a Catholic writer. "I think a writer ought to be a bit of grit in the state machine," he once said. "That applies to a democratic state machine, a socialist state machine or a Communist state machine." Mr. Greene was a superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy by writing topical novels in political settings. But many of his deepest concerns were spiritual: a soul working out its salvation or damnation amid the paradoxes and anomalies of 20th-century existence. Spiritual problems, however, were frequently overshadowed, especially for readers in this country, by Mr. Greene's distaste for what he regarded as American hypocrisy and materialism. "The Quiet American" (1956) and "The Comedians" (1966), for example, offended some readers because of their criticism of United States policies in Vietnam and Haiti. Besides serious fiction, Mr.

Greene also wrote what he described as "entertainments." These -- "Orient Express," "This Gun for Hire," "Brighton Rock" and "Our Man in Havana," for instance -- were first-rate novels of crime and intrigue. But they, too, showed a profound interest in the interplay of morality and abnormal behavior. "Brighton Rock," he wrote in his 1980 autobiography, "Ways of Escape," was "perhaps one of the best I ever wrote." In addition, Mr. Greene was often labeled a Roman Catholic writer, a description that annoyed him but that nevertheless colored understanding of his work. He was indeed a convert to Catholicism and he did deal with doctrinal issues, but he insisted that he was not a church publicist. Roman Catholic Ideas But Church Objections "Only a few of my books have a religious emphasis -- 'Brighton Rock,' 'The Power and the Glory,' 'The End of the Affair' and 'The Heart of the Matter' -- but I don't consider myself a Catholic writer, but a writer who took characters with Catholic ideas as his material," Mr.

Greene said in an interview with Alden Whitman of The New York Times in Paris in 1967. "After all, one of my novels, 'The Power and the Glory,' was condemned by the Holy Office in 1951." That book, in which the cult of the spiritual holds back the people, whose true enemies are the priests, shocked many Catholics. "I was not upset," Mr. Greene said in 1967. "In a private audience, Pope Paul told me he had read the novel and liked it. 'Parts of your novels will always offend some Catholics, but you should not bother,' the Pope said." Later, in a 1978 interview, Mr. Greene acknowledged a lingering skepticism about religion, and particularly Catholicism: "I don't like many English Catholics," he said. "I don't like conventional religious piety. I'm more at ease with the Catholicism of Catholic countries. I've always found it difficult to believe in God.

I suppose I'd now call myself a Catholic atheist." The Catholic-writer label was first affixed when "Brighton Rock" was published, and then more firmly after the publication of "The Heart of the Matter," one of his most popular books with both critics and public, though Mr. Greene said he thought it flawed. After the book came out, he wrote in 1980, "at a stroke I found myself regarded as a Catholic author in England, Europe and America -- the last title to which I had ever aspired." At His Works' Center, A Sense of Evil Yet Mr. Greene did not deny that he viewed the world through a moralist's eyes. This was also the conclusion of many critics. One critic, Richard Church, a Briton, summed up the prevailing attitude: "He sees his characters, and the scenes in which they make their penance, with an eye that elongates them and draws them into gestures made in a garish light. He delights to expose the raw nerves of evil, showing it as a force in the world, a skeletonlike figure working visible mischief in the ordinary everyday affairs of men and women and children." Mr.

Greene's writer's appeal, however, extended beyond readers concerned with good and evil to encompass those who liked a good story. He had some of the narrative flair of Robert Louis Stevenson, to whom he was related. He had, moreover, a talent for depicting local color, which he gathered at first hand; a keen sense of the dramatic; an ear for dialogue, and skill in pacing his prose. Mr. Greene's backgrounds and situations often grew out of his own wanderings. In the late 1930's, he wrote, "a restlessness set in then which has never quite been allayed; a desire to be a spectator of history, history in which I was concerned myself." Again and again in his autobiography, Mr.

Greene stressed this desire to be on the edge of danger; writing of his visits to Indochina, he mentions being attracted by the women, the evening light and, "above all, by the feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to a visitor with a return ticket." Prose That Traveled Too Swiftly to Stall "The average Greene novel," wrote the critic Adam de Hegedus, "seems to be based on a theory which is not unlike that principle of aerodynamics according to which the aircraft must maintain a specific speed or else it would tumble down. This speed Greene achieves by a masterly selection of detail, by a splendid economy of language and by swift and frequent changes of scene." Mr. Greene had a somewhat puffy face and eyes that looked down warily from his 6-foot 2-inch height. His manner was generally affable but shy. In talking, he had a tendency to skip over his R's. He had an obvious fondness for order and quiet that contrasted with his adventurous life. Born Oct.

2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, he was one of four sons of Canon Charles Henry Greene and the former Marion Raymond Greene, who were cousins. Graham attended Berkhamsted School, of which his father was headmaster, and then Balliol College, Oxford. His childhood, he said, was unhappy. The Deadliest of Games Becomes a Habit The biographer Norman Sherry, in "The Life of Graham Greene, Volume I: 1904-1939" (Viking, 1989), described a crisis that the future author went through in his second-to-last year at Berkhamsted: two classmates persecuted him -- among other things, for being bad at games -- and he suffered a nervous collapse. His family then sent him to a psychoanalyst in London, prompting an experience that in the long run, Mr. Sherry wrote, "may well have established his life's pattern of escaping from the impossible or the boring into unknown and dangerous environments which would stimulate, offer fresh experiences and also provide copy for his novels." Mr.

Greene himself wrote later that "the psychoanalysis fixed the boredom as hypo fixes the image on a negative." So he took to playing Russian roulette with an elder brother's revolver. "I slipped the bullet into a chamber and, holding the revolver behind my back, spun the chambers round," he recalled. "I put the muzzle of the revolver to my right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a minute click, and looking down the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into place. I was out by one." Mr. Greene took the revolver with him to Balliol and continued to play Russian roulette until he found that "I was beginning to pull the trigger about as casually as I might take an aspirin tablet." Later on, Mr. Greene experimented with opium, marched across Liberia and went, in wartime, into Malaya, Kenya and Indochina. Out of Oxford, where he had briefly been a member of the Communist Party, Mr. Greene worked as a copy editor on The Times of London from 1926 to 1930. "I am journalistically minded," he once said.

And he fiercely took issue with those who questioned the journalistic accuracy of his fiction, especially in "The Quiet American." "Some critics have referred to a strange violent 'seedy' region of the mind (why did I ever popularize that last adjective?) which they call Greeneland, and I have sometimes wondered whether they go round the world blinkered," he wrote later. " 'This is Indochina,' I want to exclaim, 'this is Mexico, this is Sierra Leone carefully and accurately described. I have been a newspaper correspondent as well as a novelist. I assure you that the dead child lay in the ditch in just that attitude. In the canal of Phat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water. But I know that argument is useless. They won't believe the world they haven't noticed is like that." His Fiancee's Religion Becomes His Own It was just before he joined The Times that he became a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism. Summarizing the experience, the psychiatrist and author Robert Coles wrote in 1989, in The New York Times Book Review, that it came about through Mr.

Greene's relationship with his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning, herself a convert to Catholicism. Her "moral and religious preoccupations became very much his," Dr. Coles wrote, and "at the age of 22, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church." In an interview published in 1983, Mr. Greene said a first step in the process was the day when, while attending a Catholic service, "I slipped a note into a collection box, asking for instruction because my fiancee was Catholic. "I wanted a better grasp of the nature of her faith. I had no thought of becoming a convert myself." His subsequent conversion, he said, "was purely intellectual," because of the arguments of a priest, a Father Trollope, "which persuaded me that God's existence was a probability." On another occasion, Mr. Greene wrote that it was not until years later, when he had first traveled to Mexico, that he found "emotional belief" as opposed to intellectual acceptance of his religion. A year after his conversion, Mr. Greene married Miss Dayrell-Browning. The couple had a son and a daughter and then separated in the 1960's.

His daughter, Caroline Bourget, lives in Jongny, Switzerland. His son, Francis, lives in Devon, England. Mr. Greene's first two novels, "The Man Within" and "The Name of Action," were written while he was on The Times. He left that newspaper in 1930 to become a movie critic, first for the periodical Night and Day and then for The Spectator, for the next 10 years. Early in this period he began his entertainments ("The difference between an entertainment and a novel is about 20,000 words") with "Orient Express," which was titled "Stamboul Train" in Britain. This thriller almost immediately became popular, as were most of his in that genre. His reputation as a novelist soared with "Brighton Rock," published in 1938, which deals with homicide in the British resort town of Brighton. International renown came in the years after the war, especially with "The Heart of the Matter" in 1948. The scene of this novel, considered among his best, is in West Africa, where Mr. Greene did intelligence work for the British Government during World War II. The protagonist is Maj.

Henry Scobie, an essentially commonplace man capable of pity to the point of obsession. It is pity that does the major in. Although a Roman Catholic, his sympathy for, and understanding of, his wife and his mistress lead him to commit suicide to keep from hurting their feelings. The burden of love proves too much for him. 'The Quiet American' Is an American Success Among Mr. Greene's big successes in this country was "The Quiet American," published in 1956. The novel is a tart study of an American Government do-gooder in Saigon during the anti-French uprisings of the mid-1950's. The writer insisted that he was not anti-American and that his novel recorded only what he saw in Saigon, where he was the correspondent, in 1954, for The New Republic. Mr. Greene was especially fond of "The Power and the Glory," a novel published in 1940. It is the story of a manhunt in the jungles and mountains of Mexico. The hunted is the last priest in a state where religion is outlawed: an imperfect priest, prey to alcohol and lust, yet a humble man who loves God. Many of Mr.

Greene's books were made into movies, but he said he felt the movies did not serve him well. "I hate the adaptations of my books, except when I do them myself, and then I don't always like them," he said. Once he had attained success, Mr. Greene spent much of his time traveling. But he worked during these journeys, too, dictating and revising. "I like writing after breakfast," he explained, "and revising after a good dinner, when I have Dutch courage." He was a steady writer who was not afraid to discard projects, even when they were well advanced, if they failed to satisfy him. "I hope I'm an artist," he told a visitor in 1967; on another occasion, in a bleaker mood, he remarked, "I have no talent; it's just a question of working, of being willing to put in the time." The Effects of Place And of Henry James Mr. Greene was often asked what other writers had influenced him, and for this he had a ready reply: "What one reads doesn't influence one as much as where one is. Still, a great many writers have had their effect on me.

The serious ones, I guess, were Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Henry James. He was my idol, but to say he influenced me is a bit absurd -- like saying a mountain influenced a mouse." Mr. Greene's structuring of his novels seemed ideally suited to the camera and the stage. "I have a theatrical mind," he once said. But his own plays -- including "The Living Room," "The Potting Shed," "The Complaisant Lover," "Carving a Statue" and "The Return of A. J. Raffles" -- were not outstandingly successful. Mr. Greene's long writing career made him wealthy as well as famous. He was little affected, because he preferred privacy to basking in adulation. He enjoyed his income, nonetheless, for it permitted him to live in considerable comfort and to eat well.

Of his many works, "The Honorary Consul," he said, was especially hard to write, and "perhaps the novel I prefer to all the others," while "Travels With My Aunt" was "the only book I have written for the fun of it." "Travels With My Aunt," which came out in 1969, is a lighthearted novel about a retired bank employee traveling around the world with 75-year-old dowager who has a black lover named Wordsworth. Mr. Greene's literary fame was recognized formally in 1966, when he was named by Queen Elizabeth II as a Companion of Honor. In 1986, he received one of the highest British honors, the Order of Merit. Critical enthusiasm waned for Mr. Greene's later works. "The Honorary Consul" (1973), "The Human Factor" (1978) and "The Captain and the Enemy" (1988) all received uneven reviews. Mr. Greene himself had long since taken a detached view of questions of literary success or failure.

Striking the understated note of guilt and gloom that was catnip to his loyal readers, he told an interviewer in 1971: "One fails in all sorts of ways in life, doesn't one, which are much more important than writing books. In human relations and that sort of thing." But another estimation of his feelings about his work came in "Ways of Escape," when he wrote, "Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human situation." Opening Words on the Moral Anxieties of an Anguished Century In the course of a career that spanned more than six decades, Graham Greene wrote 24 novels, along with many short stories, essays and plays and two volumes of autobiography. Here is a sampling from the opening chapters of some of his novels and a list of some major works. Mr. Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder: out into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few buzzards looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn't carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr.

Tench's heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering fingernails and tossed it feebly up at them. One of them rose and flapped across the town: over the tiny plaza, over the bust of an ex-president, ex-general, ex-human being, over the two stalls which sold mineral water, towards the river and the sea. It wouldn't find anything there: the sharks looked after the carrion on that side. Mr. Tench went on across the plaza. He said "Buenos dias" to a man with a gun who sat in a small patch of shade against a wall. But it wasn't like England: the man said nothing at all, just stared malevolently up at Mr. Tench, as if he had never had any dealings with the foreigner, as if Mr. Tench were not responsible for his two gold bicuspid teeth. -- From "The Power and the Glory" (1940, Viking) Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins.

On the other side of Bond Street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young negresses in dark-blue gym smocks engaged on the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair. Wilson stroked his very young moustache and dreamed, waiting for his gin-and-bitters. Sitting there, facing Bond Street, he had his face turned to the sea. His pallor showed how recently he had emerged from it into the port: so did his lack of interest in the schoolgirls opposite. -- From "The Heart of the Matter" (1948, Viking) One never knows when the blow may fall. When I saw Rollo Martins first I made this note on him for my security police files: "In normal circumstances a cheerful fool. Drinks too much and may cause a little trouble. Whenever a woman passes raises his eyes and makes some comment, but I get the impression that really he'd rather not be bothered. Has never really grown up and perhaps that accounts for the way he worshiped Lime." I wrote there that phrase "in normal circumstances" because I met him first at Harry Lime's funeral.

It was February, and the gravediggers had been forced to use electric drills to open the frozen ground in Vienna's Central Cemetery. It was as if even nature were doing its best to reject Lime, but we got him in at last and laid the earth back on him like bricks. -- From "The Third Man" (1950, Viking) After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat: he had said, "I'll be with you at latest by 10," and when midnight had struck I couldn't stay quiet any longer and went down into the street. A lot of old women in black trousers squatted on the landing; it was February and I suppose too hot for them in bed. One trishaw driver pedaled slowly by towards the river front, and I could see lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes. There was no sign of Pyle anywhere in the long street. Of course, I told myself, he might have been detained for some reason at the American Legation, but surely in that case he would have telephoned to the restaurant -- he was very meticulous about small courtesies.

I turned to go indoors when I saw a girl waiting in the next doorway. I couldn't see her face, only the white silk trousers and the long flowered robe, but I knew her for all that. -- From "The Quiet American" (1956, Viking) Novels: Orient Express (1932) This Gun for Hire (1936) Brighton Rock (1938) The Power and the Glory (1940) The Ministry of Fear (1943) The Heart of the Matter (1948) The Third Man (1950) The End of the Affair (1951) The Quiet American (1956) Our Man in Havana (1958) A Burnt-Out Case (1961)

Question: What was English author Graham Greene’s first name?
Answer: Henry