Graham Greene crafted some of English-language literature's finest works, part of a fascinating life marked by bouts of uncertainty and the certainty of doubt.
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Publisher
Little, Brown, hardback
This new 586-page biography from Professor Richard Greene - no relation - considers Graham Greene, the writer and the public man, the unflinching traveller into trouble and forensic investigator into the human condition I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger, the writer Graham Greene once wrote, revealing his dalliance in London in 1923 with the possible end of his earthly existence and ensuing annihilation at a spot called Ashridge Beeches on Berkhamstead Common. There was a minute click and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position, he related. I was out by one.
Finding the balance between the twin myths of Graham Greeneâs inner demons and his questing spirit.
Graham Greene, ca. 1960. Photo: Bridgeman Images By D.J. Taylor
I
n stark chronological terms, Graham Greene (1904-1991) was a member of that spangled generation of British writers born in the golden decade between 1900 and 1910, a logjam of talent that included such mighty timbers as George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh (both born in 1903), Christopher Isherwood (1904), Anthony Powell and Henry Green (both 1905) and W.H. Auden (1907). Generational solidarity went only so far among this gang of highly individual Edwardian contenders, and so the views of Greene held by his professional peers are always worth attending to.