Graham Greene

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Standard Name: Greene, Graham
Birth Name: Henry Graham Greene
An English novelist of exceptional energy, Graham Greene built a career spanning a dozen genres—most notably more than twenty novels or thrillers, as well as short stories, film reviews, travel books, plays, screenplays, and autobiography. Many of his novels wrestle with issues of belief. His personal correspondence included thousands of letters, and for much of his life he reported as a spy to the British Secret Intelligence Service . His restlessness drew him to dangerous places, adulterous relationships, self-harm, and a belief, infusing his pages, that a focus on squalor makes for an honest portrayal of the world.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Cultural formation Mary Wesley
MW was influenced in her religious thinking by several writers, including Simone Weil and Graham Greene . The novelist Antonia White stood as godmother to them both, and they seem to have fallen in mostly...
Dedications Theodora Benson
TB 's novel The Undertaker's Wife, dedicated to Graham Greene , was a more complex and subtle work than her earlier fictions.
British Library Catalogue.
Education Frances Cornford
Although her step-brother Bernard went to Eton , Frances Cornford received her education at home, and sometimes shared classes with her nearby cousins, one of whom was Gwen Darwin , later Raverat.
Cornford, Hugh, Gwen Raverat, Christopher Cornford, Frances Cornford, Gwen Raverat, and Christopher Cornford. “Frances Cornford 1886-1960”. Selected Poems, edited by Jane Dowson and Jane Dowson, Enitharmon Press, 1996, p. xxvii - xxxvii.
xxviii
Raverat, Gwen. Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood. Faber and Faber, 1977.
63-4
Frances's...
Fictionalization Violet Hunt
Versions of VH also emerge in the fictions of her lover, Ford Madox Ford . Barbara Belford suggests that she sparked elements of both Leonora Ashburnham and Florence Dowell in his The Good Soldier (1915)...
Friends, Associates Evelyn Waugh
He counted among his friends Graham Greene and his fellow comic novelists Nancy Mitford and Muriel Spark .
Friends, Associates Mary Wesley
Even when they lived in a remote spot, the Siepmanns' circle of close literary friends included Nancy Mitford , Graham Greene , Antonia White , and Emily Coleman .
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
When MW became successful as a...
Friends, Associates Muriel Spark
She acquired new literary friends after her religious conversion, such as Allen Tate , Neville and June Braybrooke (the latter of whom wrote as Isobel English , and titled two of her novels at Spark's...
Friends, Associates Antonia White
While working for the Special Operations ExecutivePolitical Intelligence Department , AW met Graham Greene , Simone Weil , and Kathleen Raine .
Chitty, Susan. Now To My Mother. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985.
137
Early in the war, as she gradually moved closer to the Church, she wrote...
Friends, Associates Elizabeth Bowen
Her travels nourished her friendships. She visited many friends on trips to the USA, including Eudora Welty , and she met Graham Greene when lecturing in Vienna.
Austin, Allan E. Elizabeth Bowen. Twayne, 1989.
3
Glendinning, Victoria. Elizabeth Bowen. Alfred A. Knopf, 1978.
184, 228-9, 218-19
Friends, Associates Marie Belloc Lowndes
Apart from MBL 's established literary friends, there were many whose early writing she encouraged to particularly good effect: Graham Greene , Margaret Kennedy , Pamela Frankau , E. M. Delafield , and L. P. Hartley .
Elizabeth Northcote, Countess of Iddesleigh, Susan Lowndes Marques, and Marie Belloc Lowndes. “List of Books by Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Foreword”. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947, edited by Susan Lowndes Marques and Susan Lowndes Marques, Chatto and Windus, 1971, pp. prelims, 1 - 3.
2
Intertextuality and Influence Beryl Bainbridge
The married couple Colin Haycraft and Alice Thomas Ellis (herself a writer) both worked at Gerald Duckworth publishers, and met BB while she was working there as a clerk. They taught her to write properly...
Intertextuality and Influence P. D. James
PDJ followed the English tradition of detective-story writing that has continued from the 1920s and 1930s, a genre in which many women have held dominant positions. She spoke of her adolescent reading as influenced in...
Intertextuality and Influence Marjorie Bowen
In his introduction to a later edition, Graham Greene notes the effect of reading The Viper of Milan when he was in his teens. From that moment I began to write,
Greene, Graham, and Marjorie Bowen. “Introductory Note”. The Viper of Milan, Bodley Head, 1960, pp. 9 - 10.
9
he states, and...
Intertextuality and Influence Rumer Godden
RG found this negotiation among publishers traumatic. She had updated Shakespeare 's The Tempest in the spirit of the entertainments which Graham Greene used to intersperse among his serious novels. Spencer Curtis thought the story...
Intertextuality and Influence Bernice Rubens
BR 's novel The Ponsonby Post, about an English diplomat in Java, seems to set foot in Graham Greene territory.
British Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1987.
1982
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
207

Timeline

13 January 1950
Carol Reed 's most successful film, The Third Man, starring Orson Welles , opened in London.
30 May 1967
Colonel Emeka Ojukwu of Eastern Nigeria made a unilateral declaration of independence on the part of the Ibo people, which set up the Republic of Biafra.
By late October 1975
The short-story volume Angels at the Ritz, by expatriate Irish writer William Trevor (born Trevor Cox in 1928), was hailed by Graham Greene as probably the best collection of stories since Joyce 's Dubliners.
Summer 2005
News broke that one of the bestselling nonfiction books of the year, Judith Kelly 's Rock Me Gently, included passages almost verbally identical with passages by other authors.