Graham Greene

Graham Greene divided his own books into novels and entertainments, and the distinction collapsed because the thrillers were the serious ones. He was the son of a headmaster and was sent to the school his father ran, an arrangement that made him a traitor to both sides and that he blamed for a good deal afterwards; he ran away, was sent to a psychoanalyst at sixteen, and later said he had played Russian roulette with his brother's revolver out of boredom. He converted to Catholicism in 1926 in order to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, and the faith he described as unbelieving became the argument running through Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair - damnation treated as a real risk rather than a metaphor. He worked for the Secret Intelligence Service in Sierra Leone during the war, under Kim Philby, and stayed loyal to Philby after his defection, writing an introduction to his memoirs that many readers found indefensible. He travelled to Mexico, Liberia, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba and Paraguay and wrote the novels out of the trips: The Quiet American in 1955 anticipated the American war in Vietnam closely enough that it was attacked in the United States for anti-Americanism. He wrote The Third Man as a story first so that Carol Reed could film it. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize repeatedly and never given it, which one committee member's papers later attributed to a personal veto. He left England for Antibes and then Switzerland, and published an attack on organised crime on the Riviera at eighty-two. He kept a dream diary for most of his life and published a selection of it. He gave much of the money from The Third Man away. His last years were spent at Vevey on Lake Geneva, where he died in 1991.

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