Graham Greene

Graham Greene was a British novelist, playwright and critic, born in Berkhamsted in 1904 and dying in 1991. He studied at Oxford, worked briefly as a journalist, and became a full-time writer in the 1930s. After converting to Catholicism, he often explored faith, guilt and moral doubt in his fiction, though he disliked being called a Catholic novelist. His travels took him to West Africa, Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam and Haiti, and these places gave his books their sharp sense of danger and political unease. He moved between serious novels and what he called entertainments, which were fast thrillers, and he also wrote screenplays, plays, essays and film criticism. His work for British intelligence during the Second World War shaped his later spy stories. Greene matters because he made popular storytelling carry real questions about loyalty, pity and conscience, and his books still read quickly and cleanly.