Graham Greene Summary

Biography EssayGraham Greene was a writer who lived his life under the torment of faith. In his fictional world, where evil dominates, good-bad men are put in situations where their individual capacit... Read more

A film actor who has found success in both Canada and the United States, Graham Greene (born ca. 1952) is a full-blood Oneida, born on the Six Nations Reserve in southwestern Ontario in the early 1950... Read more

Graham Greene is a writer who, like Fëdor Dostoevski, has lived his life under the torment of faith. When the priestly Alyosha Karamazov kisses his brother, the skeptical Ivan, at the end of the... Read more

Much of what is known of Graham Greene's life, character, and reading is found in his essays. As he himself points out, almost half of Ways of Escape (1980), the second volume of his autobiography, is... Read more

Books were a lifelong passion for Graham Greene. Book collecting, the ownership of books, and writing in books absorbed Greene, who haunted the auction rooms and secondhand bookshops of provincial Eng... Read more

In the following positive review o/Nineteen Stories, Barr provides an overview of Greene's career and states that the stories in the volume reflect Greene's development as a novelist. &#... Read more

In the following essay, Coulthard reexamines common interpretations of "The Hint of an Explanation," focusing on Greene's depiction of the character Blacker. Good fiction, as the ... Read more

In the essay below, Bayley provides a thematic and stylistic overview of Greene's short stories. "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat" is a story by Kipling that comes at the end of The J... Read more

In the following excerpt, Kelly examines Greene's early short stories, written during his years as a student, stating that in these works Greene worked out the "terrors and frustrations&... Read more

In the following mixed evaluation of Nineteen Stories, Rosenfeld praises Greene's honest depiction of childhood but faults his attempts at confessional writing. Graham Greene, who writes two ki... Read more

Below, Wilkie presents a positive assessmenet of A Sense of Reality, discussing Greene's use of myth, fantasy, and psychology in the work. In this new collection of short fiction [A Sense of Re... Read more

In the essay below, Scott examines Greene's use of myth in his short stories, focusing in particular on his depiction of the myth of childhood within the context of African and primitive themes... Read more

In the following mixed review of May We Borrow Your Husband? Allen states that the stories vary in quality but show "the author at play." There is an element in writing that critics (by ... Read more

Critical Essay by Miriam Allott Graham Greene has been writing novels for half a century. His first novel, The Man Within, appeared in 1929, his … twentieth, The Human Factor, was published ear... Read more

In the following essay, D'Cruz identifies the "comedian" as a chameleon-like figure whose emotional disengagement represents an adaptive behavior to cope with reality in a tragic ... Read more

In the following essay, Bawer examines Greene's Catholic conversion, his personal faith, and the significance of Catholicism in The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the ... Read more

Critical Essay by Christopher Lehmann-haupt Why do we read "Ways of Escape" with such absorption, if it is nothing more than a collection of occasional pieces written "as a form o... Read more

Critical Essay by Denis Donoghue Ways of Escape makes one feel, yet again, how much a writer of the Thirties Greene is. The work he did in that decade, from Stamboul Train (1932), England Made Me (193... Read more

In the following essay, Nehring relates the transformation of literary texts by subculture music groups in postwar England—specifically, the Rolling Stones' appropriation of Anthony Burg... Read more