Talk:Graham Greene (writer)

I belive that Greene worked as a short while for the Secret Intelligence Service (which is confirmed by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Man_in_Havana), but I think more tangiable proof is needed before it is added.

User 195.3.113.86 keeps adding this to Help & Faq pages. I've only tested it at Google once, and it passed. I'm sticking it here for now, maybe someone will merge it (but run a few more Google tests)

Graham Greene „Childhood is life under a dictatorship“

English novelist, short-story writer, playwright and journalist

Biography

Graham Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England on October 2, 1904 to Charles Henry and Marion Raymond Greene, the fourth of six children. He was educated at the University of Oxford. Greene wrote regularly in Student Magazines, and was an editor of The Oxford Outlook. His first work, a collection of poems, Babbling April, was published during his last year at Oxford. After graduation, he worked briefly for the Nottingham Journal. In February 1926 Greene converted to Roman Catholicism, in March he returned to London where he worked for four years as a sub-editor on The Times and for the Spectator, where he was a film critic and a literary editor until 1940. In 1927 Greene married Vivienne Dayrell-Browning. Greene‘s first novel, The Man Within, came out in 1929. A lucrative contract with Heinemann followed, for his next three novels, enabling him to resign from The Times, and devote more time to his novels. The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, his next two books, did not do very well. After the unsuccessful attempts as a novelist, Greene was about to abandon writing. The Greenes moved to the Cotswolds in 1931, and he had begun work on what was to establish him as a significant literary figure. Stamboul Train (also known as Orient Express), a thriller with a topical and political flavour, went on to become a commercial success, and a film (by Twentieth Century Fox). Greene characterized his early works as "entertainments" ("The critic as much as the film, is supposed to entertain..."), and his later works concentrated on the struggle between good and evil within man. These works were filled with moral, religious (e.g. The Heart Of The Matter) and social themes, and were inspired by his earlier conversion to Roman Catholicism. He termed these works his "novels", and they were filled with exotic locales and a detached portrayal of characters that would become his trademark. Greene was perpetually concerned with the problem of grace, with the shape of God`s mercy, and saw Catholicism not as a creed for the triumphant, but rather for the desperate. He seemed to be obsessed with evil; indeed, his last few novels added a strange mix of moral doubt and psychological conflict which enhanced the terror of the works. Whether these elements were present in his personal life has been open to debate for quite sometime, and he began to dabble in later years in mysticism and Native American spirituality. After Stamboul Train Greene started reviewing for The Spectator. He continued to review films for over a decade (over five hundred reviews of books, films, and plays). Vivien Greene gave birth to a daughter in December 1933, six months after they had moved again, this time to Oxford. Greene started travelling extensively in 1934 - brief trips to Germany, Latvia and Estonia. Francis Greene was born in September 1936. 1938 Greene made a trip to Mexico, to investigate into alleged atrocities against the Catholics. The result of the journey was two books, The Lawless Roads and The Power And The Glory. The latter won for him his first major literary prize, The Hawthornden; The outbreak of the Second World War led to Vivien and the children evacuating to Crowborough, and later Oxford. During the war Greene worked in an intelligence capacity for the Foreign Office in London. After the war he travelled as a free-lance journalist, and lived long periods in Nice, on the French Riviera. He received numerous honours from around the world, and published two volumes of autobiography, A Sort Of Life(1971), Ways Of Escape (1980), and the story of his friendship with Panamanian dictator Omar Torillo. Greene was commissioned to write a film treatment based on, Vienna, a city occupied by the Four Powers at the time. He collaborated with Carol Reedin writing The Third Man, a skilful tale of deception and drug trafficking. The film went on to win the First Prize at Cannes in 1949. Graham Greene was often a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but he never received the award. After the collapse of his marriage he had several relationships, among others in the 1950s with the Swedish actress Anita Björk. Greene died in Vevey, Switzerland, on April 3, but his last work was not published until 1994, called A World Of My Own: a dream diary, it was culled from over 800 pages of diaries and journals he kept over a 24 year span and was a partly fictitious, partly autobiographical accounting of his life and travels.

Bibliography

Brighton Rock (1938): Greene‘s religious convictions become overtly apparent

The Power And The Glory (1940): Communist Mexico during the 1930`s at a time when Catholics were persecuted and all the priests killed or driven from the country

The End Of The Affair (1951): partly based on Greene‘ s affair with Catherine Walston;

After Two Years (1949)

The Quiet American (1955): In the 1950s Greene‘s emphasis switched from religion to politics; about American involvement in Indochina ·

He died in an accident while riding his bicycle near Nice (France). I can't find a reliable source.