Download Free Graham Greene Political Writer Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Graham Greene Political Writer and write the review.

Graham Greene remarked that 'politics are in the air we breathe, like the presence or absence of a God' (The Other Man). This study is the first to provide a detailed consideration of the impact of his political thought and involvements on his writings both fictional and factual. It also offers the first detailed consideration of Greene's involvements in espionage and British intelligence from the 1920s until the late-1980s. It incorporates material not only from his major fictions but also from his prolific journalism, letters to the press, private correspondence, diaries and working manuscripts and typescripts, as well as consideration of the diverse political involvements and writings of his extended family network. It shows how the full range of Greene's writings was inspired and underpinned by his fascination with the essential human duality of political action and religious belief, coupled with an insistent need as a writer to keep the political personal.
A Finalist for the 2022 Edgar Award A Washington Post Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A vivid, deeply researched account of the tumultuous life of one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists, the author of The End of the Affair. One of the most celebrated British writers of his generation, Graham Greene’s own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the Whisky Priest. A journalist and MI6 officer, Greene sought out the inner narratives of war and politics across the world; he witnessed the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. His classic novels, including The Heart of the Matter and The Quiet American, are only pieces of a career that reads like a primer on the twentieth century itself. The Unquiet Englishman braids the narratives of Greene’s extraordinary life. It portrays a man who was traumatized as an adolescent and later suffered a mental illness that brought him to the point of suicide on several occasions; it tells the story of a restless traveler and unfailing advocate for human rights exploring troubled places around the world, a man who struggled to believe in God and yet found himself described as a great Catholic writer; it reveals a private life in which love almost always ended in ruin, alongside a larger story of politicians, battlefields, and spies. Above all, The Unquiet Englishman shows us a brilliant novelist mastering his craft. A work of wit, insight, and compassion, this new biography of Graham Greene, the first undertaken in a generation, responds to the many thousands of pages of letters that have recently come to light and to new memoirs by those who knew him best. It deals sensitively with questions of private life, sex, and mental illness, and sheds new light on one of the foremost modern writers.
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.
A “masterful . . . brilliantly constructed novel” of love and chaos in 1950s Vietnam (Zadie Smith, The Guardian). It’s 1955 and British journalist Thomas Fowler has been in Vietnam for two years covering the insurgency against French colonial rule. But it’s not just a political tangle that’s kept him tethered to the country. There’s also his lover, Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman who clings to Fowler for protection. Then comes Alden Pyle, an idealistic American working in service of the CIA. Devotedly, disastrously patriotic, he believes neither communism nor colonialism is what’s best for Southeast Asia, but rather a “Third Force”: American democracy by any means necessary. His ideas of conquest include Phuong, to whom he promises a sweet life in the states. But as Pyle’s blind moral conviction wreaks havoc upon innocent lives, it’s ultimately his romantic compulsions that will play a role in his own undoing. Although criticized upon publication as anti-American, Graham Greene’s “complex but compelling story of intrigue and counter-intrigue” would, in a few short years, prove prescient in its own condemnation of American interventionism (The New York Times).
Since the war Graham Greene has travelled habitually to the world's trouble-spots and has provided leading newspapers and journals with articles about what he saw. While contending that a writer must be free of political affiliations he has commmitted himself to many countries and causes, and while insisting that literature must never be used for political ends he has written novels informed by a political urgency. The Dangerous Edge is about his political reportage and how the observations that formed it were transformed into literature. It is about how a novelist who struggled to record public issues dispassionately became in the process an important political conscience.
A major new biography of Graham Greene with extensive new material; exclusive, never-before-seen photographs of Greene on his travels; and full family cooperationAn essential read for fans of literary biography, this book finally and fully illuminates a pivotal episode in Graham Greene's life and career in the kind of detail that will sate any fans of his work, but which also provides a fascinating glimpse into a writer's life. In 1965, Greene joined journalist Bernard Diederich in the Dominican Republic to embark on a tour of its border with Haiti, then ruled by "Papa Doc" Duvalier. They were accompanied by activist priest Jean-Claude Bajeux. Diederich had known Greene since the mid-1950s and had lived in Haiti for 14 years. He was a seasoned correspondent for the British and North American press and had reported many stories from the region, including Castro's triumph in Cuba and the death of the Dominican dictator, Trujillo. In 1963, he had been thrown out of Haiti and when Greene arrived was working from the Dominican Republic. The famous novelist was 61 and depressed, having struggled to finish A Burnt-Out Case, and was being plagued by religious doubt; Bajeux, meanwhile, had been informed that his family had been "disappeared" by Duvalier's henchmen. As this trio traveled along the border they met a number of rebels and other characters later fictionalized in Greene's most politically charged novel, The Comedians, published the following year. This book tells the story of how a series of extraordinary and often hair-raising journeys gave one of the greatest novelists of the 20th century new inspiration in his writing.
'In August 1981 my bag was packed for my fifth visit to Panama when the news came to me over the telephone of the death of General Omar Torrijos Herrera, my friend and host. . . At that moment the idea came to me to write a short personal memoir. . . of a man I had grown to love over those five years' GETTING TO KNOW THE GENERAL is Graham Greene's account of a five-year personal involvement with Omar Torrijos, ruler of Panama from 1968-81 and Sergeant Chuchu, one of the few men in the National Guard whom the General trusted completely. It is a fascinating tribute to an inspirational politician in the vital period of his country's history, and to an unusual and enduring friendship.
A master of twentieth century fiction, Graham Greene looks back on his life. This volume also includes several key interviews from throughout his long, fruitful career. Graham Greene led one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century. The son of a Hertfordshire headmaster, he quickly discovered a love for writing, beginning a career that would last a lifetime. Greene's fascination with global politics took him around the world, to places that would become the settings for many of his most famous novels: Mexico (The Power and the Glory), Sierra Leone (The Heart of the Matter), and Haiti (The Comedians) - among dozens of other far-flung locations. He produced masterpieces throughout his life, many of which now stand as indisputably canonical: Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American to name but a few.
This collection of seventeen interviews covers fifty years. Here the eminent author of The Power and the Glory, The Third Man, and The Heart of the Matter speaks of himself, his life, and his works. Though reluctant to be interviewed, especially by an academic or journalist he did not know, Greene was more at ease in an interview with a personal friend, who he felt would be less likely to misunderstand or misquote him. Yet even his good friend V. S. Pritchett spent considerable time trying to pin him down for his 1978 interview. When he finally did arrange an interview, Pritchett tells that Greene's "flat conspiratorial, laughing voice . . ., of itself, makes him the best company I've known in the last forty years". Other interviewers--included here are V. S. Naipaul and Penelope Gilliatt--shared Pritchett's opinion, but many found that he avoided idle conversation for fear that his words would be misconstrued. Greene's anxiety was not without foundation. In an interview with Michael Menshaw, Greene explained: "It's got so I hate to say who I am or what I believe...A few years ago I told an interviewer I'm a gnostic. The next day's newspaper announced that I had become an agnostic". After such incidents, Greene turned to the anecdote--relating an experience with Fidel Castro or with Papa Doc Duvalier--to communicate in interviews with strangers. Nevertheless, in all the interviews Greene granted over the years, the reader hears very clearly the voice of a man whose conversation is as painfully honest and unpretentious as is his written prose. The interviews here are divided chronologically into four periods, loosely related to his subject matter or to his reputation at the time of theinterview. Thus the reader sees the development of the writer from a callow but gifted young man into one of the foremost men of letters in the English-speaking world.