The Life of Graham Greene series

The Life of Graham Greene: Volume 1. 1904-1939

Norman Sherry

• 1990 Edgar-Critical/Biography winner
• Score: 10.4

This work presents a narrative of Graham Greene’s early life—including a breakdown in his early teens, his years at Oxford, and his courtship of his future wife—uncovering the origins of his literary preoccupations and his reasons for conversion to Roman Catholicism. Greene’s development as a novelist, from the early success of “The Man Within” to “The Power and the Glory”, is also explored in full. Winner of the 1990 Edgar Allen Poe Award for best critical/biographical study.

The Life of Graham Greene: Volume 2. 1939-1955

Norman Sherry

Written with Graham Greene’s complete consent, this extraordinary biography introduces a romantic and impassioned Greene. Delving into this early life, Sherry uncovers the origins of Greene’s literary preoccupations and his development as a novelist, penetrating the strange emotional territory that Greene made his own.

The Life of Graham Greene: Volume 3. 1956-1991

Norman Sherry

• 2005 Edgar-Critical/Biography nominee
• Score: 6.55

October 2, 2004, marks the centenary of one of the twentieth century’s most important literary figures: Graham Greene. In volume three, Norman Sherry brings this magisterial biography—twenty-seven years in the making—to a close. Following Greene, still an agent for the British government, from prerevolutionary Cuba and the Belgian Congo to adulterous interludes in Capri and Antibes, Sherry shows Greene at the height of his fame, in the company of other literary luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, Ian Fleming, and Noël Coward.

Through unparalleled access to letters, to diaries, and to Greene himself, Sherry reveals with insight and eloquence Greene’s obsessions, his complicated religious feelings, and most significantly, his art. This volume, with its wealth of new and shocking details, brings to a close what Margaret Atwood called “the definitive biography.”