GRAHAM GREEN (1904-1991)

Graham Greene was born in 1904 and educated at Berkhamsted Scool, where his father was the headmaster. He soon discovered evil, just on the other side of the door which separated the comfortable world of the family from the cruel and violent world of the school. He was a miserable teenager, with a deep sense of boredom, flirting with the idea of committing suicide, actually playing Russian roulette with a gun. After he ran away from school. he was sent for treatment to a psychoanalyst in London. There he spent the happiest time of his life. He went to study a Balliol College, Oxford, where he published a volume of poems in 1925, the year he took his degree. The next year he converted to Roman Catholicism and married in 1927. He began his career as a journalist, working for The Times. But after the publication of his first novel in 1929, he became a freelance writer, and he occasionally contributed to book reviews and film reviews to newspapers and magazines. He established his reputation with Stamboul Train (1932), his fourth novel. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, which described in Journey Without Maps, and returning to England, he became film critic for The Spectator. In 1938, he published Brighton Rock, and visited Mexico, where he found the inspiration for his next, The Power and the Glory (1940). During the War he worked for Foreign Office, and was stationed for a while at Freetown, in Sierra Leone. where he set his famous novel The Heart of the Matter (1948). After the war, he traveled extensively, for two or three decades His novels are set in different countries: in England, of course, or in Mexico, in Sierra Leone, as we have seen, but for example in Vietnam (The Quiet American, 1955), in Cuba (Our Man in Havana, 1958), in the Congo (A Burnt-Out Case, 1961), and Haiti (The Comedians, 1966). He spent his last years on the French Riviera, near Antibes, and he died in Vevey (Switzerland) on April 3, 1991.
Casalino Pierluigi, Laigueglias's scholar, 1949, who lives in Imperia, on the web, former Interior Ministry official.