Henry Graham GreeneOMCH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading novelists of the 20th century.
He converted toCatholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife,Vivien Dayrell-Browning.[4] Later in life he took to calling himself a "Catholic agnostic".[5]He died in 1991, aged 86, ofleukemia,[6] and was buried inCorseaux cemetery inSwitzerland.[7]William Golding called Greene "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety".[8]V. S. Pritchett called him "The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings and who understands the tragic and comic ironies of love, loyalty and belief."[9]
His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, werefirst cousins, both members of a large, influential family that included the owners ofGreene King Brewery, bankers, and statesmen;[13] his grandmother Jane Wilson was first cousin toRobert Louis Stevenson.[11]
In his childhood, Greene spent his summers atHarston House, theCambridgeshire home of his uncle, SirGraham Greene.[16][17] In Greene's description of his childhood, he describes his learning to read there: "It was at Harston I quite suddenly found that I could read—the book wasDixon Brett, Detective. I didn't want anyone to know of my discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Ballantyne'sCoral Island for the train journey home—always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains atBletchley..."[18]
In 1910, Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster of Berkhamsted. Graham also attended the school as a boarder. Bullied and profoundly depressed, he made several suicide attempts, including, as he wrote in his autobiography, byRussian roulette and by taking aspirin before going swimming in the school pool. In 1920, aged 16, in what was a radical step for the time,[19] he was sent forpsychoanalysis for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day student.[20] School friends included the journalistClaud Cockburn and the historianPeter Quennell.[21]
Greene contributed several stories to the school magazine,[22] one of which was published by a London evening newspaper[23][12] in January 1921.
He attendedBalliol College, Oxford, to study history. During 1922 Greene was for a short time a member of theCommunist Party of Great Britain, and sought an invitation to the newSoviet Union, of which nothing came.[24] In 1925, while he was an undergraduate at Balliol, his first work, a poorly received volume of poetry titledBabbling April, was published.[24]
Greene had periodic bouts of depression while at Oxford, and largely kept to himself.[11] Of Greene's time at Oxford, his contemporaryEvelyn Waugh noted that: "Graham Greene looked down on us (and perhaps all undergraduates) as childish and ostentatious. He certainly shared in none of our revelry."[11] He graduated in 1925 with asecond-class degree.[24]
After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on theNottingham Journal,[25][12] and then as asub-editor onThe Times.[11] While he was still at Oxford, he had started corresponding withVivien Dayrell-Browning, who had written to him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine.[11][26][27] Greene was an agnostic, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in his autobiographyA Sort of Life, he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held".[28] Greene was baptised on 28 February 1926[29] and they married on 15 October 1927 atSt Mary's Church, Hampstead, London.[30]
The Man Within (1929) was Greene's first published novel;[a] after its favourable reception he left his job atThe Times to work full-time as a novelist.[34][11] The next two books,The Name of Action (1930) andRumour at Nightfall (1932), were unsuccessful, however,[11] and he later disowned them.[12][b] His first true success wasStamboul Train (1932) which was taken on by the Book Society[36] and adapted as the filmOrient Express, in 1934.[37]
He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews forThe Spectator, and co-editing the magazineNight and Day.[44][31] His collected film reviews were later published asThe Pleasure Dome (1972).[45] Greene's 1937 film review[46] ofWee Willie Winkie, forNight and Day—which said that the nine-year-old star,Shirley Temple, displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen"[47]—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs,[48][49] and Greene left the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over.[50][51] While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece,The Power and the Glory.[50][12]
By the 1950s, Greene had become known as one of the finest writers of his generation.[52][53]
Greene also wrote short stories and plays,[40] which were well received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist.[54] His first successful play,The Living Room, debuted in 1952.[12]
Michael Korda, a lifelong friend and later his editor atSimon & Schuster, observed Greene at work: Greene wrote in a small black leather notebook with a black fountain pen and would write approximately 500 words. Korda described this as Graham's daily penance—once he finished he put the notebook away for the rest of the day.[55][56]
Part of Greene's reputation as a novelist is for weaving the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels.[40][60][61] Greene himself responded to commentators who called the world of his fiction an imaginary place:
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 around the world blinkered. 'This isIndo-China,' I want to exclaim, 'this isMexico, this isSierra 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 ofPhat Diem the bodies stuck out of the water...'[62]
Throughout his life, Greene travelled to what he called the world's wild and remote places. In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited intoMI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War.[63]Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6.[64][65] Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944.[66] He later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir,My Silent War.[67]Greene also corresponded with intelligence officer and spy,John Cairncross, for forty years and that correspondence is held by the John J. Burns Library, atBoston College.[68]
Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip toLiberia that produced the travel bookJourney Without Maps.[69] His 1938 trip to Mexico to see the effects of the government's campaign of forced anti-Catholicsecularisation was paid for by the publishing companyLongman, thanks to his friendship withTom Burns.[31] That voyage produced two books, the nonfictionThe Lawless Roads (published asAnother Mexico in the US) and the novelThe Power and the Glory. In 1953, theHoly Office informed Greene thatThe Power and the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene,Pope Paul VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism.[70]
In 1950 his brother, Hugh Carleton Greene who was head of UK Information Services inMalaya, brought Greene to Malaya during the early phase of theMalayan Emergency.[71]Greene returned to England via Indo-China in 1951 to visit his friend, Trevor Wilson, British consul in Hanoi. There he met GeneralJean de Lattre de Tassigny, French high commissioner and commander-in-chief of the French Expeditionary Corps. Greene returned several times and wrote newspaper articles[72][73] and developed the book,The Quiet American.
In 1954, Greene travelled toHaiti,[74] whereThe Comedians (1966) is set,[75] and which was then under the rule of dictatorFrançois Duvalier, known as "Papa Doc", frequently staying at theHotel Oloffson inPort-au-Prince.[76] He visited Haiti again in the late 1950s. As inspiration for his novelA Burnt-Out Case (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number ofleper colonies in theCongo Basin and in what were then theBritish Cameroons.[77] During this trip in late February and early March 1959, Greene met several times withAndrée de Jongh, a leader in the Belgian resistance during WWII, who famously established an escape route to Gibraltar through the Pyrenees for downed allied airmen.[78]
In 1957, just months afterFidel Castro began his final revolutionary assault on theBatista regime inCuba, Greene played a small role in helping the revolutionaries, as a secret courier transporting warm clothing for Castro's rebels hiding in the hills during the Cuban winter.[79] Castro, likeDaniel Ortega andOmar Torrijos, was one of several Latin American leaders Greene's friendship with whom has led some commentators to question his commitment to democracy.[11][80][60] After one visit Castro gave Greene a painting he had done, which hung in the living room of the French house where the author spent the last years of his life.[79] Greene did later voice doubts about Castro, telling a French interviewer in 1983, "I admire him for his courage and his efficiency, but I question his authoritarianism," adding: "All successful revolutions, however idealistic, probably betray themselves in time."[79]
Between 1944 and 1948, Greene was director atEyre & Spottiswoode under chairmanDouglas Jerrold, in charge of developing its fiction list.[81][12] Greene createdThe Century Library series, which was discontinued after he left following a conflict with Jerrold regardingAnthony Powell's contract. In 1958, Greene was offered the position of chairman byOliver Crosthwaite-Eyre, but declined.[82]
He was a director atThe Bodley Head from 1957 to 1968 underMax Reinhardt.[83] He used his influence to stop the firm putting his own novels forward for theBooker Prize, which he felt should go to younger writers, and to championRichard Power, whoseThe Hungry Grass he persuaded Bodley to nominate for a posthumous Booker.[84]
Greene was anagnostic, but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 after meeting his future wifeVivien Dayrell-Browning.[4] They were married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, north London.[11] The Greenes had two children, Lucy Caroline Bourget Greene (born 1933) and Francis Greene (born 1936), who was his father's literary executor.[11]
In his discussions with Father George Trollope,[85] the priest to whom he went for instruction inCatholicism, Greene argued with the cleric "on the ground of dogmatic atheism", as Greene's primary difficulty with religion was what he termed the "if" surrounding God's existence. He found, however, that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming less and less improbable",[86] and Greene converted and was baptised after vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defendedatheism, or at least the "if" ofagnosticism.[87] Late in life, Greene called himself a "Catholic agnostic".[5]
Beginning in 1946, Greene had an affair withCatherine Walston, the wife ofHenry Walston, a wealthy farmer and futurelife peer.[88] That relationship is generally thought to have informed the writing ofThe End of the Affair, published in 1951, when the relationship came to an end.[89][90]
Greene left his family in 1947,[91] but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching,[92] and they remained married until Greene's death in 1991.[93][94]
Greene lived with manic depression (bipolar disorder).[95][96] He had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life.[97] In a letter to his wife, he told her that he had "a character profoundly antagonistic to ordinary domestic life", and that "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material".[98]
Greene left Britain in 1966, moving toAntibes,[99] to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death.[11][26] In 1973, he had an uncreditedcameo appearance as an insurance company representative inFrançois Truffaut's filmDay for Night.[100] In 1981, Greene was awarded theJerusalem Prize, awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.[101][102]
He lived the last years of his life inCorseaux, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, nearVevey whereCharlie Chaplin was living in at this time. He visited Chaplin often, and the two were good friends.[7][103]
He ceased going to mass and confession in the 1950s, but in his final years began to receive the sacraments again from Father Leopoldo Durán, a Spanish priest, who became a friend.[105]
In one of his final works, a pamphlet titledJ'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice (1982), Greene wrote of a legal matter that embroiled him and his extended family inNice, and declared that organised crime flourished in Nice because the city's upper levels of civic government protected judicial and police corruption. The accusation provoked alibel lawsuit that Greene lost,[106] but he was ultimately vindicated in the 1990s when the former mayor of Nice,Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned for corruption and associated crimes.[107][108][109]
In 1984, in celebration of his 80th birthday, thebrewery which Greene's great-grandfather founded in 1799 made a special edition of its St. Edmund's Ale for him, with a special label in his honour.[110] Commenting on turning 80, Greene said, "The big advantage ... is that at 80 you are more likely these days to beat out encountering your end in a nuclear war," adding, "the other side of the problem is that I really don't want to survive myself [which] has nothing to do with nukes, but with the body hanging around while the mind departs."[110]
Cover of the second German edition ofThe Quiet American (1956), claiming to be on sale only eight weeks after the first edition, with the implication that the first is already sold out
Beginning withStamboul Train in 1932,[35][12] Greene divided his fiction into two genres:thrillers (mystery andsuspense books), which he described as entertainments; and literary works, which he described as novels.[40][111] As his career lengthened, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between "entertainments" and "novels" to be less evident.[19][54][39] When the broadly comicTravels with My Aunt (1969) was published, theNew York Times reviewer felt that it blurred the boundaries between the two: "Travels With My Aunt, the title page tells us, belongs to the 'novel' category, but reading the book very soon establishes that it is also extremely entertaining and often very funny."[112] WhenHeinemann andBodley Head reissued Greene's "entertainment"The Confidential Agent and his "novel"The Power and the Glory together in 1971 as part of theirCollected Edition of Greene's works,Julian Symons noted the "close relationship" between the genres;[113] as the edition progressed,Eric Ambler pointed out that Greene was redesignating all his "entertainments" as novels, adding "His reputation as a major twentieth-century novelist is likely to remain unimpaired."[114]
Greene was one of the more "cinematic" of twentieth-century writers; most of his novels and many of his plays and short stories have beenadapted for film or television.[11][100] The 2014 edition of Quentin Falk'sTravels in Greeneland: The Cinema of Graham Greene lists 62 titles between 1933 and 2013 based on Greene material.[115] Some novels were filmed more than once, such asBrighton Rock in 1947 and 2011,[116]The End of the Affair in 1955 and 1999,[117] andThe Quiet American in1958 and2002.[118] The 1936 thrillerA Gun for Sale was filmed three times in English alone, notably asThis Gun for Hire in 1942.[119] Greene received anAcademy Award nomination for the screenplay forCarol Reed'sThe Fallen Idol (1948),[120] adapted from his own short storyThe Basement Room.[121] He also wrote several original screenplays.[12] In 1949, after writing the novella as "raw material", he wrote the screenplay for a classicfilm noir,The Third Man, also directed by Reed and featuringOrson Welles andJoseph Cotten.[11][26] In 1983,The Honorary Consul, published ten years earlier, was released as afilm (under the titleBeyond the Limit in some territories), starringMichael Caine andRichard Gere.[122] Author and screenwriterMichael Korda contributed a foreword and introduction to this novel in a commemorative edition.
Greene's literary style was described byEvelyn Waugh inCommonweal as "not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry and of independent life".[123] Commenting on the lean prose and its readability, Richard Jones wrote in theVirginia Quarterly Review that "nothing deflects Greene from the main business of holding the reader's attention".[54] Greene's novels often have religious themes at their centre. In his literary criticism he attacked themodernist writersVirginia Woolf andE. M. Forster for having lost the religious sense which, he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters, who "wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin".[124] Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul that carries the permanent consequence of salvation or damnation, and of the ultimatemetaphysical realities of good and evil, sin anddivine grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the world Greene depicts; and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin, and doubt.V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist sinceHenry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil.[125] Greene concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives—their mental, emotional, and spiritual depths. His stories are often set in poor, hot and dusty tropical places such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.[126]
A stranger with no shortage of calling cards: devout Catholic, lifelong adulterer, pulpy hack, canonical novelist; self-destructive, meticulously disciplined, deliriously romantic, bitterly cynical; moral relativist, strict theologian, salon communist, closet monarchist; civilized to a stuffy fault and louche to drugged-out distraction, anti-imperialist crusader and postcolonial parasite, self-excoriating and self-aggrandizing, to name just a few.
The Nation, describing the many facets of Graham Greene[127]
The novels often portray the dramatic struggles of the individual soul from a Catholic perspective.[31] Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction[31]—for example, the implication that Scobie inThe Heart of the Matter, by deliberately causing his own damnation, sacrifices himself for others and thereby sanctifies his sins. His friend and fellow Catholic Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of theQuietist heresy.[128][129][123] This aspect of his work also was criticised by the theologianHans Urs von Balthasar, as giving sin a mystique. Greene responded that constructing a vision of pure faith and goodness in the novel was beyond his talents.[citation needed] Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view by Edward Short is inCrisis Magazine,[125] and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented byJoseph Pearce.[86]
Catholicism's prominence decreased in his later writings.[130][d] The supernatural preoccupations of the earlier work declined and were replaced by ahumanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching.[131][31][129]
In his later years, Greene was a strong critic ofAmerican imperialism and sympathised with the Cuban leaderFidel Castro, whom he had met.[132][133][12] Years before theVietnam War, he prophetically attacked the idealistic but arrogant beliefs ofThe Quiet American, whose certainty in his own virtue kept him from seeing the disaster he inflicted on the Vietnamese.[134][12][135] InWays of Escape, reflecting on a Mexican trip, he criticised Mexico's government for "making a hypocritical pretence of supporting Cuba" while simultaneously feeding intelligence on visitors to the American authorities.[136] In the 1930s he was already praisingIgnazio Silone for his attempt to reconcile the social messages of Catholicism and Marxism;[31] in Greene's opinion, "Conservatism and Catholicism should be ... impossible bedfellows".[137][138]
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
— Graham Greene
In May 1949, theNew Statesman held a contest for parodies of Greene's writing style: he himself submitted an entry under the name "N. Wilkinson", and took second place. Greene's entry comprised the first two paragraphs of a novel, apparently set in Italy,The Stranger's Hand: An Entertainment. Greene's friend, the film directorMario Soldati, believed it had the makings of a suspense film aboutYugoslav spies in postwarVenice. Upon Soldati's prompting, Greene continued writing the story as the basis for a film script.[139][140] Apparently he lost interest in the project, leaving it as a substantial fragment that was published posthumously inThe Graham Greene Film Reader (1993)[141] andNo Man's Land (2005).[142] A script forThe Stranger's Hand was written byGuy Elmes on the basis of Greene's unfinished story, and filmed by Soldati.[100][143][144] In 1965, Greene again entered a similarNew Statesman competition pseudonymously, and won an honourable mention.
Acclaimed during his lifetime, Greene was for many years a perennialcontender for theNobel Prize in Literature, and he was shortlisted for the prize several times by theNobel committee.[3] In 1961 he was among the final three candidates for the prize.Anders Österling, chair of the Nobel committee, stated that Greene "is fully worthy of the prize, not just in regard of his most recent work [A Burnt-Out Case], but for his vigorous work as a whole", but the prize that year was awarded to the Yugoslavian writerIvo Andrić.[1][145]
In 1966[2] and 1967, Greene was again among the final three choices, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary. For the 1967 prize the committee also consideredJorge Luis Borges andMiguel Ángel Asturias. Committee chairman Anders Österling again pushed for a prize to Greene describing him as "an accomplished observer whose experience encompasses a global diversity of external environments, and above all the mysterious aspects of the inner world, human conscience, anxiety and nightmares", but ultimately Asturias was the chosen winner.[146][147][148]
In 1969, whenSamuel Beckett andAndré Malraux were the main contenders for the prize, Greene's candidacy was however dismissed by the Nobel committee. Committee memberKarl Ragnar Gierow stated: "Despite my admiration for several of his earlier works, I would not even then have placed him in the class where a Nobel laureate belongs".[149] The following year Gierow further elaborated that Greene's best work was too far back in time, and that his most recent novelTravels With My Aunt was not of Nobel prize class, stating "If the committee excludes him from its proposal this year, it seems to mean that it considers him out of the discussion, in case he does not return to the level that once made his name relevant."[150]
Following the publication of his novelThe Honorary Consul, Greene was shortlisted again in 1974, but this time the Nobel committee was hesitant to award an English language novelist for a second year in succession following the prize awarded toPatrick White the previous year, and Greene was passed over.[151]
Greene remained a favourite to win the Nobel prize in the 1980s, but it was known that two influential members of theSwedish Academy,Artur Lundkvist andLars Gyllensten, opposed the prize for Greene and he was never awarded.[152][e]
Blue plaque erected in 2011 by English Heritage at 14 Clapham Common North Side, Clapham, London
Greene is regarded as a major 20th-centurynovelist,[153] and was praised byJohn Irving, before Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language".[154] NovelistFrederick Buechner called Greene's novelThe Power and the Glory a "tremendous influence".[155] By 1943, Greene had acquired the reputation of being the "leading English male novelist of his generation",[156] and at the time of his death in 1991 had a reputation as a writer of both deeply serious novels on the theme of Catholicism,[157] and of "suspense-filled stories of detection".[158]
The Graham Greene International Festival is an annual four-day event of conference papers, informal talks, question and answer sessions, films, dramatised readings, music, creative writing workshops and social events. It is organised by the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and takes place in the writer's home town of Berkhamsted (about 35 miles north-west of London), on dates as close as possible to the anniversary of his birth (2 October). Its purpose is to promote interest in and study of the works of Graham Greene.[163]
He is the subject of the 2013 documentary film,Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene.[164] His 1987 trip to Moscow to visit Kim Philby is the subject ofBen Brown's playA Splinter of Ice (first staged 2021 and filmed that year);Oliver Ford Davies originally played Greene.[165][166] Greene also features as a character in the filmThe Honourable Rebel (2015) aboutElizabeth Montagu who worked with him on the script ofThe Third Man.[167][168] In the 2001 filmDonnie Darko, the protagonist is inspired by a classroom discussion of Greene's short story "The Destructors" and its line "destruction after all is a form of creation".[169]
^This was the third novel Greene had completed.[31] In 2009, a newly discovered manuscript titledThe Empty Chair, written in longhand when Greene was 22 and a recent convert to Catholicism, appeared inThe Strand Magazine in serial form.[32][33]
^In 1974, Greene said he had suppressed them from theBodley Head–HeinemannCollected Edition of his works "without hesitation".[35]
^For example, whenAnthony Burgess asked Greene in an interview whether his novels were the first "in English to present evil as something palpable—not a theological abstraction but an entity", Greene replied, "I see we're getting on to myself as a Catholic novelist. I'm not that: I'm a novelist who happens to be a Catholic. The theme of human beings lonely without God is a legitimate fictional subject. To want to deal with the theme doesn't make me a theologian."[38] Greene rejected the label on other occasions.[39][40][29]
^Asked in 1980 whether Fischer inDoctor Fischer of Geneva was evil, he replied, "The big Catholic verities like good and evil – you won't find these in my later work".[38]
^When an interviewer asked Greene in 1984 about his persistent failure to win the prize, he replied, "Don't let's talk about it... It's always the same story of poor Mr Arthur Lundqvist saying 'over my dead body'."[133]
^abSweeney, Jon (2008).Almost Catholic: An Appreciation of the History, Practice, and Mystery of Ancient Faith. United States: Jossey-Bass. p. 23.ISBN978-0787994709.
^abcdefghijklmnMichael Shelden, 'Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991)',Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2008accessed 15 May 2011
^Greene's introduction to the Philby book is mentioned in Christopher Hitchens' introduction toOur Man in Havana (pg xx of the Penguin Classics edition)
^Butcher, Tim (2010)."Graham Greene: Our Man in Liberia".History Today Volume: 60 Issue: 10. Retrieved20 March 2012.insisted this trip, his first to Africa and his first outside Europe
^abVinocur, John (3 March 1985). "The Soul-Searching Continues for Graham Greene: The celebrated writer; whose new book is a long-forgotten novella [The Tenth Man], still dwells on doubt and failure".New York Times Magazine. New York.
^Johnson, Daniel (4 April 1991). "Whisky priest of the novel: Daniel Johnson assesses Graham Greene, lifelong student of mankind's evil".The Times. No. 63983. p. 14.
^"Yttrande av Herr Gierow"(PDF). Svenska Akademien.Graham Greenes produktion har i stort sett hållit sig jämnare, men också för honom ligger de prisvärda verken långt i det förgångna. Sedan hans namn i fjol stod på kommitténs för- slagslista, har han kommit med en ny roman, Travels with Aunt, skriven med säker hand, fränt lynne och en fabulering, som inte ett ögonblick tröttnar, vilket däremot händer läsaren. Den bredmynta burlesken höjer sig i slutet till ett annat plan, dock inte det där ett Nobelpris hör hemma. När kommittén i år utesluter honom från sitt förslag lär det betyda, att den anser honom borta ur diskussionen, för den händelse han inte skulle vända tillbaka till den nivå, som en gång gjorde hans namn aktuellt.
Allain, Marie-Françoise, 1983.The Other Man: Conversations with Graham Greene. Bodley Head.
Bergonzi, Bernard, 2006.A Study in Greene: Graham Greene and the Art of the Novel. Oxford University Press.
Cloetta, Yvonne, 2004.In Search of a Beginning: My Life with Graham Greene, translated by Euan Cameron. Bloomsbury.
Diederich, Bernard (2012).Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America, 1954–1983. London: Peter Owen.ISBN978-0-7206-1488-6.
Fallowell, Duncan,20th Century Characters, Loaded: Graham Greene at home in Antibes (London, Vintage Books, 1994)
Fussell, Paul (1980). "Graham Greene's Parallel Journey", inAbroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars. Oxford University Press, pp. 65-70.
Greene, Richard, editor, 2007.Graham Greene: A Life in Letters. Knopf Canada.
Hazzard, Shirley, 2000.Greene on Capri. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Henríquez Jiménez, Santiago J.La realidad y la construcción de la ficción en la novelística de Graham Greene, La Laguna: Universidad, 1992.
Henríquez Jiménez, Santiago J. "Graham Greene's novels seen in the Light of His Religious Discourse" en Wm. Thomas Hill (ed.).Perceptions of Religious Faith in the Work of Graham Greene. Oxford, New York...: Peter Lang. 2002. 657–685.
Henríquez Jiménez, Santiago J. "Don Quijote de la Mancha y Monsignor Quixote: la inspiración castellana de Grahan Greene en el clásico español de Cervantes" en José Manuel Barrio Marco y María José Crespo Allué (eds.). La huella de Cervantes y del Quijote en la cultura anglosajona. Centro Buendía y Universidad de Valladolid. Valladolid. 2007. 311–318.
Henríquez Jiménez, Santiago J. "Miguel de Unamuno y Graham Greene: coincidencias en torno a los cuidados de la fe" en Teresa Gibert Maceda y Laura Alba Juez (coord..). Estudios de Filología Inglesa. Homenaje a la Dra. Asunción Alba Pelayo. Madrid: UNED. 2008. 421–430.
Hull, Christopher.Our Man Down in Havana: The Story Behind Graham Greene's Cold War Spy Novel (Pegasus Books, 2019)online review
Phillips, Gene D., 1974.Graham Greene: Films of His Fiction, Teachers' College Press.
O'Prey, Paul, 1988.A Reader's Guide to Graham Greene. Thames and Hudson.
Valentinitsch, Bernhard. "Graham Greenes Roman 'The Human Factor' (1978) und Otto Premingers gleichnamige Verfilmung (1979)". In:JIPSS (Journal for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies), No. 14. Graz 2021, p. 34-56.
West, William John (1998).The quest for Graham Greene (1st US ed.). New York: St. Martin's Press.ISBN978-0-312-18161-1.
