The Life of Graham Greene: Volume Two: 1939-1955 - Hardcover

Sherry, Norman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670860565 ISBN 13: 9780670860562

Publisher: Viking Adult, 1995

Synopsis

A companion to the Edgar Award-winning first volume offers a portrait of Greene at the height of his literary career and examines his love affair with an American woman, the end of his marriage, and his experiences as a spy. 25,000 first printing. $20,000 ad/promo. Tour.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Sherry's first volume, covering the years 1904-1939, gave ample promise of launching one of the finest literary biographies of a contemporary writer, and his second volume amply fulfills it. Again, he has enjoyed extraordinary access to Greene himself before his death in 1991, to his much-abused wife, Vivien, and even to Greene's spy buddy Kim Philby in Moscow. He journeyed to many of the exotic places Greene wandered in his peripatetic life, and he has emerged with a riveting picture of a man profoundly at odds with life, but one whose anxieties and obsessions came to reflect those of his violent century. This volume covers the most dramatic period of Greene's life, in which we see him as a fireman in the London blitz, a wartime agent in West Africa, briefly a publisher (where he had wonderful taste but became so bored with office life that he invented a horrendous author who tormented the entire staff) and finally as a brilliantly successful novelist and screenwriter. These are the years of The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Fallen Idol, The Third Man and The Quiet American-all works that, as Sherry painstakingly shows, were closely woven from experience and belief as Greene-ever a would-be suicide-sought potential death in postwar Europe, Malaya, Vietnam and Kenya. Then, as Greene said, "I do seem to muck up everyone I love." Here, in sometimes numbing detail, are his failing marriage and his affairs, first with the plucky but unglamorous Dorothy Glover, later with the gorgeous but determinedly married Catherine Walston, whom Greene pined after, fed on occasional crumbs of nights together, for years. The life of a man so bent on danger, moral and physical, who created from his pain a number of novels supremely emblematic of our times, can hardly help but be vivid. But Sherry himself writes so well, and he so skillfully integrates Greene's own words, published and unpublished, that he turns his biography into something truly special. Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Greene's storied life offers up enough juicy material to provide the framework for dozens of best-sellers and/or serious novels. And, in fact, as Sherry painstakingly shows in this second volume of his massive but entertaining biography, Greene's novels contain perhaps more of the raw truth of his tortured existence than he allowed himself to reveal in his autobiographical writings. His best novels, The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951), reflect a strong religious dimension while simultaneously exposing his lifelong suicidal depression. At the same time, Greene showed great capacity for living and a zest for adventure. An M16 spy during World War II (under the direct supervision of notorious Soviet agent Kim Philby), Greene was assigned to Sierra Leone to keep an eye on the Vichy colony in French Guinea. His work there makes up the heart of this segment of Sherry's book, but considerable space is also devoted to Greene's love affairs with dozens of prostitutes and his decade-long, tumultuous relationship with Lady Catherine Walston. Sherry also looks at Greene's film work with David O. Selznick and Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol and The Third Man. While he jumps around chronologically, Sherry adeptly links obscure events with their literary manifestations. Either as round two in a definitive biography in progress or as a rousing adventure story in its own right, this is a major work of literary history. Ron Antonucci

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0670860565
• ISBN 13: 9780670860562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400