Graham Greene

Graham Greene was born in Hertfordshire to a prominent local family: his father was a housemaster (administrator) at a prestigious local boarding school, and his mother was one of the owners of the famous Greene King Brewery company. Greene was a heavy drinker and a devout Catholic from an early age—two qualities that he passed on to most of his protagonists. Greene studied at Oxford, where he experimented with Communism, a doctrine that he ultimately rejected. He was lonely and depressed at Oxford, but devoted himself to writing poetry and short fiction. After graduating, he worked as a journalist for a variety of English and Irish publications. His first successful novel was his fourth, Stamboul Train (1932). An “adventure yarn,” Stamboul Train was highly popular, and inspired Greene to write a long series of skillful but “lowbrow” entertainments, such as Our Man in Havana (1958) and The Third Man (1949). In his early 30s, Greene was recruited to work for MI6, the United Kingdom’s espionage agency (the rough counterpart of the CIA in America). As an MI6 agent, Greene traveled to many countries around the world—including Cuba, Liberia, Mexico, Vietnam, and Haiti—and reported on the state of society. Though Greene was rarely in any serious danger during these missions, they inspired him to write novels of espionage and intrigue, including The Quiet American. Greene’s masterpiece, The Power and the Glory (1940), was inspired by his travels through Mexico. Greene lived an exceptionally long life, and continued to write prolifically well into his 80s. He was often considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but he never won it (after his death, it was revealed that Greene had been nominated for the prize four times). He died in 1991 of leukemia.