A Greene chronology
Graham (Henry) Greene was born on 2 October 1904 at St John’s, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the fourth of six children of Charles Henry Greene (1865–1942), the Head of Berkhamsted School, and his wife Marion Raymond (1872–1959). He died on 3 April 1991 aged eighty-six and is buried in the cemetery of village of Corseaux, outside Vevey in Switzerland where he spent the final phase of his life. In between these stark bookends of a life, birth and death, Greene led a life rich in adventure, culture, travel, passion and friendship. He became, in his lifetime, a prolific, admired and respected writer, while in the decades following his life his reputation only grew to the point where, today, he is rightly regarded as one of the finest British novelists ever.
At the time of Greene’s death, Sir Kingsley Amis, one of Greene’s literary contempories, spoke for many when he said that ‘He will be missed all over the world. He was our greatest living novelist.’ To John Le Carre, Greene was ‘a great and magical writer, hard to fit into any pattern’ and, for Le Carré personally, ‘my guiding star.’ P.D. James added at the time: ‘Many people regard him as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, novelist of his generation, who achieved the double distinction of wide popularity and critical acclaim. It has always seemed reprehensible to me that he was never awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.’