The Life of Graham Greene, Vol. 1: 1904-1939

Graham Greene was one of the most guarded and complex literary figures of our time. In the first volume of Norman Sherry’s celebrated biography, Greene’s early life is explored through letters, diaries, and hundreds of interviews, including a breakdown in his early teens, his years at Oxford, and, most particularly, his long and tortuous courtship of his future wife. Sherry uncovers the origins of Greene’s literary preoccupations, as well as reasons for his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Greene’s development as a novelist, from the early success of The Man Within to his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory , is also explored in full, as Sherry literally follows Greene’s footsteps to West Africa and Mexico, penetrating the strange and emotional territory that Greene made into his own.