Graham Greene was born in Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire on October 2, 1904, to Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene. Greene’s father was the headmaster of Berkhamstead School, where Greene was an unhappy pupil for sixteen years. When Greene was thirteen, his parents moved him from the headmaster's residence to room with the boarding students, where he was bullied. Following several suicide attempts, he attempted to run away, at which point his parents removed him from the school for six months. He then lived in London under the care of Kenneth Richmond, an amateur psychoanalyst inspired by Carl Jung.

Greene finished his education at Berkamstead and attended Balliol College at Oxford, where he studied history and wrote poetry for the Weekly Westminster Gazette and the student magazine Oxford Outlook. In his last year at university, Greene published a poorly-received collection of poetry and abandoned his ambitions to become a poet. After leaving Oxford, Greene became a journalist and, in 1926, worked as a subeditor at The Times. During the same year, Greene converted to Roman Catholicism. In 1927, he married the Catholic Vivien Dayrell-Browning. The couple lived in London and had two children, Lucy Caroline (b. 1933) and Francis Hugh (b. 1936).

In 1929, Greene wrote and published The Man Within, a critical and commercial success that enabled him to leave his job at The Times. Greene’s next two novels were less successful; however, Stamboul Train was written to have popular appeal and draw a wide readership. Greene labelled it the first of his “entertainments”; a term he used for work sharing many characteristics with popular thriller fiction, but which he felt more deeply explored the moral complexities of their situations and characters. He later abandoned the term.

Greene was an avid cinemagoer, first writing on film at Oxford, where he reviewed film for Oxford Outlook. During the 1930s, he reviewed over four hundred films for The Spectator. His passion for the cinema led him to work as a screenwriter for producer and director Alexander Korda during the 1940s. Greene’s screenwriting method was to produce a very detailed treatment of the narrative before developing the screenplay, which he called a “film story.” Some of these treatments were themselves published as novels, including The Third Man. The narrative techniques of cinema, such as rapid cutting between scenes, became a part of Greene’s stylistic repertoire, not only as a screenwriter, but as a novelist, too.

When World War II broke out, Greene began working at the Ministry of Information commissioning and editing war propaganda, while also serving as an air raid warden at night. Greene moved to the Secret Intelligence Service in 1941, and was sent to Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943 as a counter espionage officer. Greene’s cover story while in Sierra Leone was the persona of a police officer in the Colonial Office. After returning to Britain in 1943, he moved to the Iberian branch of the Intelligence Service where he monitored intelligence operations in Gibraltar, Lisbon, Madrid, and Tangier. While working at the Iberian Branch, Greene’s superior officer was Kim Philby, who was to later become notorious for his defection to the Soviet Union. Greene’s experience of espionage work informed the plots of a number of his most celebrated novels, including Our Man in Havana and The Third Man. For many years after the war, Greene continued to carry out work unofficially for the Intelligence Service, which supported his extensive travels in the 1950s and 1960s. These foreign experiences generated material for much of his fiction of the same period. The Heart of the Matter drew on Greene’s experiences in Sierra Leone, while The Quiet American grew out of Greene’s visits to Asia, and A Burnt Out Case from his travels in Africa.

During the 1960s, Greene gave up his British residence in favor of the homes he owned in Capri and Paris, as well as Antibes, where he eventually spent the majority of his time. In 1978, Greene's fictional settings returned to London with The Human Factor, which, though set in the 1970s, drew on Greene’s experiences while serving in the Secret Intelligence Service in the 1940s. Greene continued to write throughout the 1980s, producing the nonfiction Getting to Know the General in 1985, about General Omar Torrijos of Panama.

Greene’s marriage broke down in the 1940s as a result of his infidelities. He and Vivienne lived apart from 1946 onwards, though they never divorced. After the war, Greene began an affair with Catherine Walston, an American married to an English baron, which served as the inspiration for his novel The End of the Affair. Later, Greene began an affair with another married woman, Yvonne Cloetta, who remained his companion until his death.

Greene and Cloetta moved to Corseaux, Switzerland in 1990, where Greene died of leukemia at the Hôpital de la Providence, Vevey, on April 3, 1991. Greene was buried on April 8 in Corseaux.





Sources

"Graham Greene (British author)." In Encyclopædia Britannica Online, July 21, 2017. Encyclopædia Britannica (Accessed April 3, 2020).

Pearce, Joseph. “Graham Greene: Doubter Par Excellence.” Lay Witness, June 2001, http://www.catholiceducation.org/en/culture/art/graham-greene-doubter-par-excellence.html.

Shelden, Michael. “Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991).” In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/40460.

Sherry, Norman. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. New York: Viking, 1989-2004.