16 Facts About Henry Green

Henry Green was the pen name of Henry Vincent Yorke, an English writer best remembered for the novels Party Going, Living, and Loving.

Henry Green published a total of nine novels between 1926 and 1952.

Henry Green's father, Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, the son of John Reginald Yorke and Sophia Matilda de Tuyll de Serooskerken, was a wealthy landowner and industrialist in Birmingham.

Henry Green grew up in Gloucestershire and attended the New Beacon School in Sevenoaks.

Henry Green then went to Eton College, where he became a friend of fellow pupil Anthony Powell and wrote most of his first novel, Blindness.

Henry Green studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and there began a friendship and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh of Hertford College.

Henry Green left Oxford in 1926 without taking a degree and returned to Birmingham to engage in his family business.

Henry Green started by working with the ordinary workers on the factory floor of his family's factory, which produced beer-bottling machines, and later became the managing director.

In 1940, Henry Green published Pack My Bag, which he regarded as a nearly-accurate autobiography.

Henry Green's last published novel was Doting ; this was the end of his writing career.

Henry Green's best-regarded novels are Living, Party Going, and Loving.

Henry Green's father dies, leaving the business to his son.

Henry Green was serving with me in the ranks, and he told me he had once asked the elderly butler who was over him what the old boy most liked in the world.

Henry Green discovers that Nancy is the illegitimate daughter of Mr Grant, who sent Charley to her thinking he might console her for the death of her husband, an RAF pilot killed in action.

Henry Green was admired in his lifetime by W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Eudora Welty, Anthony Burgess, Evelyn Waugh, and Rebecca West.

Edwin Frank, editor of the New York Review of Books, said Henry Green was "one of the 20th century's great unpeggable originals, each of whose novels takes off for new and unexpected places".