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Novelist, short-story writer, dramatist, screenwriter, film critic, news correspondent, editor, essayist, biographer, and writer of children's books, Graham Greene is a recognized master of his craft, a prolific entertainer (self-proclaimed in many of his subtitles) who tells a good tale while challenging values, perceptions, and worldviews. He has been called "the first major English-writing novelist who is also a Catholic" (Harry Sylvester); "one of the really significant novelists now writing in any language" (Sean O'Faolain); and "a searching, irresistible talent and a true magician ... in the descent of the modern masters" (Morton D. Zabel). In his work Greene has encompassed both the theological and the secular and has combined comedy and tragedy in mixtures labeled "heretical," "Catholic," "sordid" and "wry." Zabel argues that he raised the thriller "to a skill and artistry few other writers of the period, and none in English, had arrived at." Arthur Calder-Marshall finds Greene constructing "an atmosphere of horror, disgust, evil, terror, and loneliness" out of what O'Faolain calls "the broken lives of the betrayed ones of the earth." What sets Greene's mystery fiction apart is his ambition (stated in his introduction to the collected edition of The Confidential Agent, 1939) "to create something legendary out of a contemporary thriller." The result has been thrillers that investigate the human condition, the psychology and the heart of man, amid conditions in which the seemingly familiar and benign prove strange and dangerous, and the exotic and uncivilized prove familiar extensions of the ordinary.
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