John Drinkwater Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Graham Greene

Critical Essay by Graham Greene

SOURCE: A review of A Man's House, in The Spectator, Vol. 153, No. 5535, July 27, 1934, p. 129.

An English literary figure, Greene is generally considered the most important Catholic novelist of the twentieth century. In his major works he explored the problems of spiritually and socially alienated individuals living in corrupt and corrupting societies. In the following essay, he reviews Drinkwater's A Man's House.

Every generation has The Sign of the Cross it deserves, but Mr. Drinkwater's version [A Man's House] has suffered a little from the time-lag. Although this story of a Jewish family in Jerusalem in A.D. 33 is written in, roughly speaking, contemporary English, it has the air of an older, more frankly melodramatic day. The blind girl miraculously healed after a rather abrupt conversion and courted by a Roman centurion, bow-armed in a breastplate; the handsome young convert with Renaissance hair who elopes with...
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