His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of Greene's journey. Crossing the red-clay terrain from Sierra Leone to the coast of Grand Bassa with a chain of porters, he came to know one of the few areas of Africa untouched by colonization. Western civilization had not yet impinged on either the human psyche or the social structure, and neither poverty, disease, nor hunger seemed able to quell the native spirit. 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.
In the late 1930s, Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to report on how the inhabitants had reacted to the brutal anticlerical purges of President Calles. The Lawless Roads is his spellbinding record of that journey. Taking him through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, where all the churches had been destroyed or closed and the priests driven out or shot, that provided him with the setting and theme for one of his greatest novels, The Power and the Glory . This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by David Rieff. 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.
Part of the Writers' Britain series, first published in the 1940s, this book offers Graham Greene's evaluation of British drama, from its roots in the Mystery and Miracle plays of the market carnival through Shakespeare and the Restoration to the 20th century.
Graham Greene set two of his novels, "A Burnt out Case" and "The Heart of the Matter" in Africa. Each arose out of visits to Africa - during each of which he kept a journal. Both are printed here and provide a glimpse of the novelist responding to the raw material of his art.
Critical essays on novels and novelists accompanied by character sketches of such famous persons as Pope Pius XII and Fidel Castro
Graham Greene's autobiographical account of schooldays and Oxford; encounters with adolescence, psychoanalysis and Russian roulette, his marriage and conversion to Catholicism and how he rashly resigned from the Times when his first novel was published.
'Four and a half years of watching films several times a week ... I can hardly believe in that life of the distant thirties now, a way of life which I adopted quite voluntarily from a sense of fun.' So begins Graham Greene's Introduction to this collection of his film reviews for The Spectator and the distinguished, ill-fated magazine Night and Day between 1935 and 1940. During these years he was also writing such unforgettable novels as Brighton Rock , The Power and the Glory , and A Gun for Sale , and for readers of Graham Greene's novels this volume carries a real bonus, revealing as much about Greene the man and his creative processes as it does about the films he writes on. But Greene the film critic would be well worth reading even if he were not Greene the novelist as well. Here he writes on Garbo at the peak of her career, on the best of the British documentary movement, on films by Buñuel, Capra, Hitchcock, Korda, Lubitsch, Renoir, and many others. But he also relishes the cinema for itself, at its most popular; he praises the anarchic early Marx Brothers films, Fred Astaire in Top Hat , and W. C. Fields. There are insights and quotable phrases on every page of this irresistible collection, and Greene's asides on contemporary developments in the late 30s give an additional interest to these reviews. There are reviews of propaganda films, discussions of censorship and references to contemporary cultural events (Greene fantasises, in a 1937 review of A Day at the Races , about taking Maureen O'Sullivan to the new Surrealist Exhibition). This collection is packed with contemporary film stills – many of them given double-page spreads – and is a delight to browse in. There is an appendix on the famous libel case following Greene's review of Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie , and Greene's Introduction to the volume not only puts his career as a film reviewer in perspective, but also contains some splendid anecdotes.
"Lord Rochester's Monkey" was written between 1931 and 1934 and, because of the reputation of its subject, the notorious Restoration libertine and poet, the book failed to find a publisher. Rochester was the most prominent of rakes. He was also a fine lyrical and satirical poet whose work, in Greene's opinion, has been greatly underestimated, being overshadowed by his life of lechery and drunkenness, wild pranks and practical jokes. At court, Charles II suffered but respected Rochester's coruscating satires, joined in his erotic escapades and rewarded him with distinctions. Yet the last thirteen years of his life were "clouded by the fumes of drink" and literary quarrels. On his deathbed in 1680 - he was only 33 - he called for Dr Burnet and repented. His friend Etheridge wrote of him: "I know he is a devil, but had something of the angel yet undefac'd in him".
Seven interesting letters which share interesting insights on how writers live and what does and does not affect them in the contemporary world as they go about arriving at their concerns.
A selection of previously uncollected reports about what Graham Greene saw on his travels. The articles span seven decades and encompass interests at home and abroad.
Out of print. In a Mylar cover.
Drawing on his private world of dreams, the author of The Power and the Glory provides readers with an inner glimpse at the fantasy life that he considered integral to his creative expression. 10,000 first printing. National ad/promo.
When Graham Greene died in 1991, at the age of 86, his reputation as a "Catholic" writer was assured. His books reflected an awareness of sin and confronted political and religious themes with a somber eye. From 1936 to 1987, the British Catholic journal The Tablet provided Greene with a forum for his works-in-progress and sometimes unorthodox religious views. For the first time his Tablet contributions are collected in one volume; much of the material has remained forgotten for half a century. For the first time, too, Greene's many book reviews for The Tablet are brought together. His column for the newspaper's "Fiction Chronicle" praised the anti-Fascist Italian novelist Ignazio Silone and even a science fiction by the Czech author Karel Capek.