Graham Greene: A Life in Letters

GREENE, Richard ; GREENE, Richard - editor

ISBN 10: 0676979742 / ISBN 13: 9780676979749

Published by Knopf Canada, Canada, 2007

About this Item

Meticulously chosen and engagingly annotated, this selection of letters many of them seen here for the first time gives an entirely new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, exotic travel and romantic entanglement. xxxiv, 446pp, with an Index. A bright, clean, unmarkedcopy - 'as new'. The unclipped dustjacket shows just some very little & faint surface rubs.

Seller Inventory # 059628

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Graham Greene: A Life in Letters
• Publisher: Knopf Canada, Canada
• Publication Date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0676979742
• ISBN 13: 9780676979749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Printing: 1st Printing
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near New
• Weight: 817 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Biography & Autobiography
  • Literary Criticism
  • Letters, Memoirs, Papers, Diaries

About this title

Synopsis

There have been a number of Graham Greene biographies, but none has captured his voice, his loves, hates, family and friends–intimate and writerly–or his deep understanding of the world, like this astonishing collection of letters.
Graham Greene is one of the few modern novelists who can be called great. In the course of his long and eventful life (1904—1991), he wrote tens of thousands of letters to family, friends, writers, publishers and others involved in his various interests and causes. A Life in Letters presents a fresh and engrossing account of his life, career and mind in his own words. Meticulously chosen and engagingly annotated, this selection of letters–many of them seen here for the first time–gives an entirely new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, exotic travel and romantic entanglement.

In several letters, the individuals, events or places described provide the inspiration for characters, episodes or locations found in his later fiction. The correspondence describes his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Sierra Leone, Liberia and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye. The volume includes a vast number of unpublished letters to authors Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R.K. Narayan and Muriel Spark, and to other more notorious individuals such as the double-agent Kim Philby. Some of these letters dispute previous assessments of his character, such as his alleged anti-Semitism or obscenity, and he emerges as a man of deep integrity, decency and courage. Others reveal the agonies of his romantic life, especially his relations with his wife, Vivien Greene, and with one of his mistresses, Catherine Walston. The letters can be poignant, despairing, amorous, furious or amusing, but the sheer range of experience contained in them will astound everyone who reads this book.

About the Author

Richard Greene is a professor of English at the University of Toronto and the editor of the highly acclaimed Selected Letters of Edith Sitwell. He is also writing a biography of Sitwell.