During his earliest period, Greene dealt often, in both his long and his short fiction, with the initiation of a youngster into the adult world, that is, the transformation by experiences which can sometimes prove cruel and disillusioning. Later, in his three most deeply and problematically "religious" novels, Greene depicts rites of passage in such a way that good and evil are indistinguishable. Pinkie in Brighton Rock (1938) believes the only way to survive is to rewrite the golden rule: cause pain to everyone lest they inflict it on you. The whiskey priest in The Power and the Glory finds companionship among criminals that was unknown to him when the pious came kissing his hand. Major Scobie in The Heart of the Matter is corrupted by pity. Greene is the supreme exemplar in twentieth-century fiction of the guilt-obsessed writer who has worked through corruption-ofinnocence so thoroughly that he has brought it out on its other side as innocence-of-corruption.
Graham Greene was born 2 October 1904 at Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, England, to Charles Henry Greene, headmaster of Berkhamstead School, and Marion R. Greene. He was one of six children. The parents were cousins, both born with the family name Greene, and Robert Louis Stevenson was Marion's first cousin.
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