Graham Greene

Graham Greene was born on 2nd of October, in the year 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England.

Greene was a noted novelist and author of the 20th century.

His original name was Henry Graham Greene, and he used Graham Greene as his pen name.

The writer belonged to an influential family of that time. His parents were Marion Raymond Greene and Charles Henry Greene. His family owned the Greene King Brewery.

He married Vivien Dayrell-Browning in October 1927. They had two children, Lucy and Francis.

He did his schooling from Berkhamsted School. His father was a teacher there, who later went on to become its headmaster. He had a difficult time in school, which is why he contemplated suicide. Later, he joined Oxford University’s Balliol College, where he studied History.

In his college days, he published his very first work, a poetry compilation, called Babbling April. It couldn’t garner praise.

After college, he started working as a private tutor. He then changed his profession and became a journalist at Nottingham Journal.

He wrote two types of fiction novels, thrillers and literary works.

His next work came out in 1929, which was called The Man Within. The novel was well received. It inspired Graham to become a full time writer. But his next two works couldn’t manage to win the audience’s hearts. He did freelance journalism to support himself financially. He got his first major success with the 1932-published Stamboul Train. Later, it was turned into a film called Orient Express.

Greene’s most memorable work was The Power and the Glory. It was published in 1940. The novel was set in Tabasco, a Mexican city, of the 1930s. It revolved around the life of an unnamed Roman Catholic. TIME magazine, in 2005, included the novel in the list of 100 best novels of the English language.

Greene also wrote a few plays and short stories. His short stories like Twenty-One Stories (1954) and The Last Word (1990), were well-received.

He got many honors for his works. He won the Hawthornden Prize for the novel ‘The Power and the Glory’, in 1941. The Heart of the Matter won him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, in 1947. In 1967, he was shortlisted for the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. The next year, he was honored with the Shakespeare Prize.

Every year, The Graham Greene International Festival is organized to commemorate his birth anniversary.

Graham’s life story was captured on the camera in a documentary titled ‘Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene’. The movie was released in 2013.

The writer was caught in a controversy in 1937 when he wrote the review of the movie, Wee Willie Winkie, in which he wrote comments on the sexuality of the child actor Shirley Temple.

The writer suffered from acute depression all his life.

Graham died on 3 April, 1991, at the age of 86, due to leukemia.