"A Biographical Sketch of one of England’s greatest novelists and writers, Graham Greene”

"A Biographical Sketch of one of England’s greatest novelists and writers, Graham Greene”

My dear friends, thinkers and my fellow lovers of literature and you of all thoughts, opinions and views, I bid and ask you to join with me in another voyage of intellectual discovery and do join with me in the task of critical thinking. 

Today I have the privilege and honor of speaking of and presenting the life and works of one of the greatest English writers and one of her greatest novelists, Graham Greene, the author of many literary treasures, books once begun cannot be put down and once read through, engage our minds, spirits and souls as few works of fiction and prose can do.

I am a great fan of English and American literature. When I read the great poets such as Keats, Shelley, Byron, T.S. Eliot, and writers and novelists such as Dickens, Kipling, Melville, Sinclair Lewis and Steinbeck, my mind and consciousness are raised to a different level of understanding. In reading these authors and coming to know them, I am lifted up intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. I have and never will regret the time I have spent reading them and absorbing their greatness, despite American society telling us on a constant basis that time spent with them has no practical value as producing no income. A life without this great literature is a life cheated and wasted of what these greatest of minds have to offer us.

Graham Greene was born in 1904 and died in 1991. He was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century. He was popular and wrote both serious Catholic novels and thrillers for entertainment. He became a Catholic after meeting his future wife in 1926. He spent his childhood with his uncle and attended a private school, Berkhamsted, as a boarder and then attended Oxford to study history. After leaving Oxford he worked for a tine as a tutor and then turned to journalism. He published his first novel in 1929, The Man Within, which had a favorable reception, followed by two books that were not successful. His first true success was the novel, Stamboul Train, published in 1932. 

He was recruited by MI6 and was posted to Sierra Leone in the Second World War. He left Europe at thirty years of age in 1935 on a trip to Liberia which resulted in his book Journey Without Maps. He travelled to Mexico in 1938 to observe the anti-Catholic campaign on the part of the government which resulted in two books, The Lawless Roads and The Power and the Glory. He travelled to Haiti in 1954 which produced the novel The Comedians. He supplemented his income by freelance journalism and book and film reviews. He also wrote short stories and plays. By the 1950s he had come to be regarded as one of the finest writers of his generation. Between 1944 and 1948 he worked in publishing and was director of The Bodley Head publishing house from 1957 to 1968. In 1986 he was awarded Britain’s Order of Merit. He died of lukemia in 1991. 

He wrote thrillers such as Our Man in Havana, A Gun for Sale, and The Ministry of Fear and more serious novels with philosophical themes and Catholic themes such as The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, and The Human Factor. 

Greene had a history of depression and beginning in 1946 had a romance with another woman. He left his family but his wife refused to give him a divorce, in accord with Catholic teaching. He left Britain in 1966 for the Antibes to be close to a woman he had known since 1959 and lived the last years of his life in Vivey on Lake Geneva. He died in 1991 of leukemia.

Greene is regarded as a major twentieth-century novelist. During his life he was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize and also in his life collected several literary awards. 

I conclude this essay with these comments: I have found all of Greene’s writings, and this includes his short stories and plays, most moving and stirring. His novels, in particular The Power and the Glory, Brighton Rock and The Heart of the Matter, continue to move me. The same may be said of his thrillers, such as The Ministry of Fear, A Gun for Sale, The Confidential Agent, and Our Man in Havana. All of these are excellent and as thrillers you cannot put them down. I recommend all his works and once again, as I have said before, do not let your children miss the literary output of this man, a very great and enduring writer and master of English prose.

I am indebted to the Wikipedia article on this writer for this essay.