Graham Greene

Graham Greene was a giant of twentieth-century English literature. Novelist, short story writer, journalist, and playwright, when he passed in 1991 I remember my English teacher mentioning it at the beginning of class with a lump in her throat. His novels treat life's moral ambiguities in the context of what was then contemporary political settings but give those of us reading him now incredibly insightful portraits of some twentieth-century seismic shifts in politics and culture, and it his novels that I will concentrate on here.

Greene's first published work was Babbling April (1925), a book of verse and his first novel was The Man Within (1929). The success of these two publications saw him quit his job at the venerable Times of London and go to work for The Spectator his base for three decades traveling the world as freelance journalist spending and using the expense paid travel to search out locations for his novels
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Greene's first three novels are commonly referred to as his teething time and not generally renowned. He came into his own though with The Stamboul Train (1932) known more popularly as The Orient Express in which he played off various characters against each one another as they ride a train from the English Channel to the Bospheus. This would be the first of a series of novels he would refer to as 'entertainments', works similar to thrillers in their spare, tough language and their suspenseful, swiftly moving plots, but possessing greater moral complexity and depth. Stamboul Train was also the first of his novels to be made into a film. It was followed by three more 'entertainments' that were equally popular with the world; A Gun for Sale (1936, filmed 1942), Confidential Agent_(1939 filmed 1945) and the Ministry of Fear (1943, filmed in 1945). A fifth 'entertainment', The Third Man, published in novel form in 1949 was originally a screenplay for a film directed by Carol Reed.