Graham Greene

Graham Greene was born on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, England. Over the course of a sixty-year career, he produced twenty-four novels and numerous plays, film scripts, and short stories, returning again and again to themes of moral ambiguity and the high stakes of twentieth-century politics, as seen in The Power and the Glory (1940), The Third Man (1949), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955), and more. His 1926 conversion to Catholicism has led many to describe Greene as a Catholic writer, a term he purportedly despised, telling the New York Times in 1967, “I don’t consider myself a Catholic writer, but a writer who took characters with Catholic ideas as his material.” He passed away in 1991 at the age of eighty-six.

Illustration by William Pène du Bois