Rider Haggard's
King Solomon's Mines (1885) that Greene attributes his "odd African fixation." But it was Marjorie Bowen's
The Viper of Milan (1906), read when he was fourteen, that instilled in him the desire to be a writer, provided him with a pattern of human nature, and at the same time it seems, confirmed his sense of a lost childhood. This last feeling is connected with the young Greene's horror of school-a revulsion made stronger by the divided loyalties instilled in the boy because his father was headmaster. Unable to bear the monotony of school life, he was driven at the age of sixteen to make a break for freedom by hiding out on Berkhamsted Common. This act led his parents (Charles and Marion Raymond Greene) to seek psychoanalysis for their son, and this period proved to be for Greene "perhaps the happiest six months of my life" (
A Sort of Life).
In 1924 when he was a student at Oxford Greene wrote his first book reviews for the Oxford Outlook.
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