Graham Greene was born in Hertfordshire, the son of the headmaster of Berkhamsted School. After a disturbed childhood, he went to Balliol College, Oxford, and then began a career in journaism, joining The Times in 1926. In that year he was converted to Catholicism, partly through the influence of his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning.Greene's first novel was published, The Man Within. The comparative success of this book induced him to give up his Times job, but his next 2 novels were failures. In 1932, he produced a best-selling thriller, Stamboul Train, and thereafter frequently wrote what he called "entertainments", such as A Gun for Sale (1936), Loser Takes All (1955) and Our Man in Havana (1958), as opposed to "serious novels". Both genres, however, tend to juxtapose incident-packed stories in atmospheric locations with themes of moral and spiritual struggle.
Greene's inner turmoil found expression in extensive travel, often in dangerous areas of the world. His travel books include Journey Without Maps (1936), in Liberia, and The Lawless Roads (1939), in Mexico. His first book to receive critical acclaim, Brighton Rock, was published in 1938, and it was also the first of Greene's novels to contain a Catholic dimension.
An explicitly Catholic theme runs through The Power and the Glory (1940), considered by many to be Greene's finest novel. Here the central figure is the 'whisky' priest, a weak and frightened character who nevertheless feels impelled to fulfil his priestly duties, despite the constant threat of death at the hands of the revolutionary Mexican government.
During World War 2, Greene was stationed at Freetown, Sierra Leone, which provided the setting for another of his best-known novels, The Heart of the Matter (1948). This book explores the downfall of a British colonial officer, driven by pity to commit the mortal sin of suicide. A preoccupation with sin and moral failure dominates Greene's novels, and this is usually played out in an environment characterised by danger, violence and seedy decay.
Many of Greene's novels have been set in parts of the world where political collapse is imminent. In The Quiet American (1956), Greene contemptuously dissects the destructive but well-intentioned blundering of an American government agent in Vietnam in the early 1950s. Our Man in Havana (1958, film 1959) is set in Cuba just before the Castro revolution. Whether "entertainments" or "serious novels", Greene's books describe a strikingly distinctive world where the characters labour under various forms of social, political, or psychological stress.
Eighteen films have been made of his work, and The Third Man (1949), a magnificent Cold War spy thriller directed by Carol Reed, was written especially for the screen. In the 1950s, he produced a number of plays, including The Living Room (1953) and The Complaisant Lover (1959). His own adventures are described in A Sort of Life (1971) and Ways of Escape (1980). After 1966, Greene lived on the French Riviera where he died in 1991.
