Graham Green author page

Graham Greene biography

Graham Greene (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English novelist, short-story writer, playwright and critic whose work spans literary fiction and thrillers. After early employment in journalism, he published his first novel, The Man Within, in 1929 and went on to produce a sustained body of fiction noted for moral tension and precise prose.

Greene’s major novels include Brighton Rock (1938), The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951), The Quiet American (1955) and Our Man in Havana (1958). Many were adapted for cinema and television, and he also wrote screenplays, among them the treatment for Carol Reed’s film The Third Man (1949). His output further encompasses travel writing, essays, memoir and short fiction.

Alongside adult work, Greene wrote a quartet of picture-book stories first issued between 1946 and 1953: The Little Train, The Little Fire Engine, The Little Horse Bus and The Little Steamroller. These titles were originally illustrated by Dorothy Craigie and later by Edward Ardizzone, and they have remained in print across multiple editions for younger readers.

Recognition during his lifetime included the Hawthornden Prize for The Power and the Glory (1941) and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter (1948). Greene continued to publish new work into the late twentieth century; a previously unpublished short story from 1962, “Reading at Night,” was issued from archive in 2025.