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" of his youth. Kelly then discusses The Last Word, a work he feels "conveys a synoptic view of the stages of [Greene's life as a writer."]

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 Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and the Sex Pistols' resurrection of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock—to the avant-garde tradition in aesthetic theory, also discussing Colin MacInnes's documentation of the London music scene of the 1950s in his novel Absolute Beginners.

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 Affair, and A Burnt-Out Case.

In the essay below, Boardman examines Greene's treatment of aesthetic concerns, including faith, belief imagination, and moral consciousness, in "Under the Garden."

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.

In the following essay, McCartney discusses the political implications of "The Destructors," concluding that the story is "essentially a reflection of twentieth-century British politics."

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 modern world.

In the essay below, Bayley provides a thematic and stylistic overview of Greene's short stories.

In the following review, Pryce-Jones criticizes Greene's political loyalties and offers unfavorable assessment of The Captain and the Enemy.

In the excerpt below, Miller analyzes three of Greene's short stories, including "The Basement Room," "The Destructors," and "Under the Garden," which the critic believes represent the themes and techniques of Greene's short fiction as a whole.

In the following mixed review of A Sense of Reality, Corke comments on the four stories in the volume, praising Greene's professionalism and faulting his use of paradox.

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 earlier this year. And as one reflects upon the impressive series of novels and stories which begin in pre-war England, travel during the next decades through areas of darkness over the world from Mexico and Africa to Haiti, Vietnam and Argentina, and finally return to the England of the 1970s, setting forward new intimations of trouble for the ...

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

After more than 50 years before the reading public, Graham Greene has become an institution, the living proof that a contemporary novelist can tackle important subjects and still enjoy immense popularity. As a result, a new work by him is a major event in the international publishing season. (p. 338) It is difficult to pin down unerringly the source of Greene's popularity. His appeal cuts across several classes of reader, and the link is probably his readability. For Greene, the novel still tells a s...

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 (1935), A Gun for Sale (1936) to Brighton Rock (1938), The Lawless Roads (1939), and The Power and the Glory (1940), is not his best; much of it is overwritten, besotted with a rhetorical extravagance taken over from Conrad's The Arrow of Gold. But if not his best work, it is his most typical, producing his major themes, situations, and ima...

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.

Graham Greene belongs to the category of obsessive artists: all of his writing life he has seen the world in essentially the same way, and he has written his novels—twenty-four of them now—to give forms to that vision. This is in no sense a pejorative, or even a limiting judgment: some visions are important enough to demand, and to justify, a lifetime's attention, and Greene's achievement as a novelist is surely a function of his obsessive single-mindedness. Greene's world...

In the positive assessment of Nineteen Stories below, Burnham discusses stylistic and thematic elements in the short stories.

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."

In the following mixed evaluation, Coffey faults the unevenness and lack of emotional power in May We Borrow Your Husband? but praises five stories for their shrewdness and craftsmanship.

In the following mixed evaluation of Nineteen Stories, Rosenfeld praises Greene's honest depiction of childhood but faults his attempts at confessional writing.

"A Sort of Life," the first volume of Graham Greene's autobiography, was not equivocal in its title alone. Depicted there was a typical Georgian childhood among the British intellectual middle class, a world of nannies, eccentric aunts and uncles, doting if remote parents who fostered an early love of literature, unhappy school experiences followed by an Oxford education: in short, the world depicted—with some variations—in Cyril Connolly's "Enemies of Promis...

Below, Wilkie presents a positive assessmenet of A Sense of Reality, discussing Greene's use of myth, fantasy, and psychology in the work.

It might be thought that it's only the current absence of Faulkner and Waugh and even Hemingway that makes Greene seem a novelist of consequence instead of, say, a fourth-rate Conrad. Is Greene not really a writer whose conceptions, plots, and style are, if the truth were told, as seedy as his famous settings? Can he construct? Can he imagine plausible characters and deliver believable images of their behavior in an efficient style? Is not his melodramatic, Manichean vision of life less a sign that h...

Somebody once told me that Les Liaisons Dangereuses was the greatest novel in the world. This opinion amazed me. I thought the hero of that book ludicrously improbable. He seemed to think of evil as something for the long winter evenings; for him, gratuitously ruining the lives of others was a hobby. This same flaw lies at the heart of Graham Greene's [Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party]. Perhaps we should think of it not as a novel but as an allegory—a nice word, which if it does not who...

In the following mixed review of Twenty-One Stories, Barrett praises Greene's craftsmanship but faults his inability to present realistic characters.

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 of therapy"? The most obvious answer is, because Mr. Greene could take the entries in a plumbing manual, tie them together gracefully and make them seem coherent and interesting. Furthermore, "Ways of Escape" is decorated with striking physical descriptions of the many corners of the world to which Mr. Greene escaped. There are enduri...