The Portable Graham Greene

Description

In his essays, criticism, screenplays, autobiography, and novels, Graham Greene explored a territory located somewhere on the border between despair and faith, treachery and love.
 
This cross-section of Greene’s work was originally selected with the author’s help in 1973 and has now been extensively revised and updated. It includes the complete novels The Heart of the Matter and The Third Man, along with excerpts from ten other novels; short stories; selections from Greene’s memoirs and travel writings; essays on English and American literature; and public statements on issues that range from repression in the Soviet Union to torture in Northern Ireland to the paradoxical virtue of disloyalty. An extensive critical and biographical introduction, headnotes, chronology, and bibliography by editor Philip Stratford make The Portable Graham Greene as invaluable for scholars as it is essential for any traveler through Greene’s richly menacing and strangely seductive literary landscapes.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.The Portable Graham GreeneIntroduction
Principal Dates, Travels, Books
Bibliographical Notes

I. Reminiscences

Editor’s Preface
Primary Symbols
The Future Strikes
Life on the Border
Russian Roulette
First Travels
A Salmon Tea
Journey Back
A Discovery
Return
Africa Revisited

II. Fiction

Editor’s Preface
The End of the Party
Minty’s Day
The Innocent
A Marriage Proposal
The Prison Cell
The Heart of the Matter
The Third Man
The Destructors
A Small Affair
A Shocking Accident
The Signing-Up of 59200/5
The Blessing
Cheap in August
Travel Tips from Aunt Augusta
The Wedding Reception
Monsignor Quixote and Sancho on Doubt

III. Criticism

Editor’s Preface
The Lesson of the Master
From Feathers to Iron
Rider Haggard’s Secret
Francois Mauriac
The Redemption of Mr. Joyboy
Ford Madox Ford
Frederick Rolfe: Edwardian Inferno
“Sore Bones; Much Headache”
John Gerard
The Novelist and the Short Story

IV. Commitments

Editor’s Preface
Two Statements on Commitment
Convenience and Morality
The Last Pope
Colette’s Funeral Rites
Unholy Waugh
A Superstition to Live By
Slide into Barbarism
Letter to a West German Friend
The Daniel-Sinyavsky Trial
Shame of the Catholics, Shame of the English
What’s Wrong with the Gospels?
A Misguided Pope
The Great Spectacular
The Meeting in the Kremlin
The Virtue of Disloyalty

Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose long life nearly spanned the length of the twentieth century, was one of its greatest novelists. Educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, he started his career as a sub-editor of The Times of London. He began to attract notice as a novelist with his fourth book, Orient Express, in 1932. In 1935, he trekked across northern Liberia, his first experience in Africa, recounted in A Journey Without Maps (1936). He converted to Catholicism in 1926, an edifying decision, and reported on religious persecution in Mexico in 1938 in The Lawless Roads, which served as a background for his famous The Power and the Glory, one of several “Catholic” novels (Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair). During the war he worked for the British secret service in Sierra Leone; afterward, he began wide-ranging travels as a journalist, which were reflected in novels such as The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, The Human Factor, Monsignor Quixote, and The Captain and the Enemy. In addition to his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, two books of autobiography—A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape—two biographies, and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays and film and book reviews to The Spectator and other journals, many of which appear in the late collection Reflections. Most of his novels have been filmed, including The Third Man, which the author first wrote as a film treatment. Graham Greene was named Companion of Honour and received the Order of Merit among numerous other awards.US

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