57 Facts About Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene was an English writer and journalist regarded by many as one of the leading English novelists of the 20th century.

Graham Greene was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times.

Graham Greene was awarded the 1968 Shakespeare Prize and the 1981 Jerusalem Prize.

Graham Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926 after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning.

Graham Greene died in 1991, aged 86, of leukemia, and was buried in Corseaux cemetery.

Henry Graham Greene was born in 1904 in St John's House, a boarding house of Berkhamsted School, Hertfordshire, where his father was house master.

Graham Greene was the fourth of six children; his younger brother, Hugh, became Director-General of the BBC, and his elder brother, Raymond, an eminent physician and mountaineer.

Charles Graham Greene was second master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry, who was married to Charles' cousin.

In 1910, Charles Graham Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster of Berkhamsted.

Graham Greene contributed several stories to the school magazine, one of which was published by a London evening newspaper in January 1921.

Graham Greene suffered from periodic bouts of depression while at Oxford, and largely kept to himself.

Graham Greene was an agnostic, but when he later began to think about marrying Vivien, it occurred to him that, as he puts it in A Sort of Life, he "ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held".

Graham Greene was baptised on 26 February 1926 and they married on 15 October 1927 at St Mary's Church, Hampstead, London.

Graham Greene published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929; its favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist.

Graham Greene supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day.

The last book Graham Greene termed an entertainment was Our Man in Havana in 1958.

Graham Greene wrote short stories and plays, which were well received, although he was always first and foremost a novelist.

Graham Greene's writing influences included Conrad, Ford, Haggard, Stevenson, James, Proust, Buchan, and Peguy.

Graham Greene later wrote an introduction to Philby's 1968 memoir, My Silent War.

Graham Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip to Liberia that produced the travel book Journey Without Maps.

Graham Greene first travelled to Haiti in 1954, where The Comedians is set, which was then under the rule of dictator Francois Duvalier, known as "Papa Doc", frequently staying at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince.

And, in the late 1950s, as inspiration for his novel, A Burnt-Out Case, Graham Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of leper colonies in the Congo Basin and in what were then the British Cameroons.

In 1957, just months after Fidel Castro began his final revolutionary assault on the Batista regime in Cuba, Graham Greene played a small role in helping the revolutionaries, as a secret courier transporting warm clothing for Castro's rebels hiding in the hills during the Cuban winter.

Graham Greene created The Century Library series, which was discontinued after he left following a conflict with Jerrold regarding Anthony Powell's contract.

In 1958, Graham Greene was offered the position of chairman by Oliver Crosthwaite-Eyre, but declined.

Graham Greene was a director at The Bodley Head from 1957 to 1968 under Max Reinhardt.

Graham Greene was an agnostic, but was baptised into the Catholic faith in 1926 after meeting his future wife Vivien Dayrell-Browning.

Graham Greene found that "after a few weeks of serious argument the 'if' was becoming less and less improbable", and Greene was converted and baptised after vigorous arguments initially with the priest in which he defended atheism, or at least the "if" of agnosticism.

Graham Greene left his family in 1947, but Vivien refused to grant him a divorce, in accordance with Catholic teaching, and they remained married until Graham Greene's death in 1991.

Graham Greene had a history of depression, which had a profound effect on his writing and personal life.

Graham Greene left Britain in 1966, moving to Antibes, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known since 1959, a relationship that endured until his death.

In 1981, Graham Greene was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society.

Graham Greene lived the last years of his life in Vevey, on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, the same town Charlie Chaplin was living in at this time.

Graham Greene visited Chaplin often, and the two were good friends.

Graham Greene ceased going to mass and confession in the 1950s, but in his final years began to receive the sacraments again from Father Leopoldo Duran, a Spanish priest, who became a friend.

In one of his final works, a pamphlet titled J'Accuse: The Dark Side of Nice, Graham Greene wrote of a legal matter that embroiled him and his extended family in Nice, and declared that organised crime flourished in Nice because the city's upper levels of civic government protected judicial and police corruption.

The accusation provoked a libel lawsuit that Graham Greene lost; but he was vindicated after his death when, in 1994, the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Medecin, was imprisoned for corruption and associated crimes.

In 1984, in celebration of his 80th birthday, the brewery which Graham Greene's great-grandfather founded in 1799 made a special edition of its St Edmund's Ale for him, with a special label in his honour.

Graham Greene died of leukaemia in 1991 at the age of 86.

Graham Greene originally divided his fiction into two genres: thrillers, such as The Ministry of Fear, which he described as entertainments, often with notable philosophic edges; and literary works, such as The Power and the Glory, which he described as novels, on which he thought his literary reputation was to be based.

The last book Graham Greene termed an entertainment was Our Man in Havana in 1958.

When Travels with My Aunt was published eleven years later, many reviewers noted that Graham Greene had designated it a novel, even though, as a work decidedly comic in tone, it appeared closer to his last two entertainments, Loser Takes All and Our Man in Havana, than to any of the novels.

Graham Greene, they speculated, seemed to have dropped the category of entertainment.

Graham Greene was one of the more "cinematic" of twentieth-century writers; most of his novels and many of his plays and short stories have been adapted for film or television.

Graham Greene received an Academy Award nomination for the screenplay for the 1948 Carol Reed film The Fallen Idol, adapted from his own short story The Basement Room.

In 2009, The Strand Magazine began to publish in serial form a newly discovered Graham Greene novel titled The Empty Chair.

The manuscript was written in longhand when Graham Greene was 22 and newly converted to Catholicism.

Graham Greene's stories are often set in poor, hot and dusty tropical places such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.

Graham Greene responded that constructing a vision of pure faith and goodness in the novel was beyond his talents.

Graham Greene's entry comprised the first two paragraphs of a novel, apparently set in Italy, The Stranger's Hand: An Entertainment.

In 1965, Graham Greene again entered a similar New Statesman competition pseudonymously, and won an honourable mention.

Graham Greene is regarded as a major 20th-century novelist, and was praised by John Irving, prior to Graham Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language".

In 1967, Graham Greene was again among the final three choices, according to Nobel records unsealed on the 50th anniversary in 2017.

Graham Greene remained a favourite to win the Nobel prize in the 1980s, but it was known that two influential members of the Swedish Academy, Artur Lundkvist and Lars Gyllensten, opposed the prize for Graham Greene and he was never awarded.

Graham Greene collected several literary awards for his novels, including the 1941 Hawthornden Prize for The Power and the Glory and the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter.

The Graham Greene International Festival is an annual four-day event of conference papers, informal talks, question and answer sessions, films, dramatised readings, music, creative writing workshops and social events.

Graham Greene is the subject of the 2013 documentary film, Dangerous Edge: A Life of Graham Greene.