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The Life of Graham Greene #1

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

norman sherry

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Graham Greene was one of the most guarded and complex literary figures of our time. In the first volume of Norman Sherry’s celebrated biography, Greene’s early life is explored through letters, diaries, and hundreds of interviews, including a breakdown in his early teens, his years at Oxford, and, most particularly, his long and tortuous courtship of his future wife. Sherry uncovers the origins of Greene’s literary preoccupations, as well as reasons for his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Greene’s development as a novelist, from the early success of The Man Within to his masterpiece, The Power and the Glory , is also explored in full, as Sherry literally follows Greene’s footsteps to West Africa and Mexico, penetrating the strange and emotional territory that Greene made into his own.

816 pages, Paperback

First published June 1,1989
Series
The Life of Graham Greene
Literary awards
edgar award, 

This edition

Format
816 pages, Paperback
Published
September 7, 2004 by Penguin Books
ISBN
9780142004203
ASIN
0142004200
Language
English
Characters More characters
  • Graham Greene

    Graham Greene

    Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (2 October 1904 – 3 April 1991) was an English novelist and author regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene had acquired a reputation early in hi...

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About the author

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norman sherry

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Norman Sherry was an English novelist, biographer, and educator who was best known for his three-volume biography of the British novelist Graham Greene. He was Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University.
Sherry was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, England, the younger twin (by eleven minutes) of Alan. Sherry studied at King's College, Newcastle, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1955.
He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He also wrote on Joseph Conrad, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Jane Austen. His Life of Graham Greene was praised by David Lodge for being "a remarkable and heroic achievement" that he predicted would prove "the definitive biography of record" of Greene.
From 1983, Sherry held the post of Mitchell Distinguished Professor of Literature at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.
He was married three times: first to the children's novelist Sylvia Sherry, then to Carmen Flores (with whom he had a son and a daughter), and finally to Pat Villalon.

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Community Reviews

Rating(4.1 / 5.0, 24 votes)
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24 reviews All reviews
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Ayano_4man
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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"Sherry's biography of the first 35 years of Greene's life is exhaustive, that is probably the thing to start with. If you are not a fan of Graham Greene, I cannot emphasize enough that you should not read this book. Though Greene had an incredible life, this biography is not meant for those who just want to know about his travels. Rather, this is for Greene obsessives. Even, a huge fan of Greene - he is probably my favourite English language author - was not thoroughly enough prepared for this. To fully appreciate it I would probably have to have read all his books. And so I can't really recommend this to most people or acclaim it as a truly great biography because the reader requires too much knowledge. That's not to put down Sherry's work; the whole thing is an incredible study of a person. Now I just have to find and read the other two volumes."

Incidentally, I am just getting to Volume 2 four years later. It's next up in my list of To Read.
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Nightships
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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"'I found a cable waiting for me in Mexico City asking me to apologize to that bitch Shirley Temple'"
The Life of Graham Green p. 621

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Hiirokaze
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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An enormous and exhausting literary study of the life and work of a major modern writer of the 20th century. Sherry's 3-volume biography chronicles Greene's life and works and adventures and affairs providing a fascinating account of an extraordinary life. Sherry theorizes that the private Greene can be best understood through his fiction and I tend to agree with this. The main male characters in Green's major novels, like The Heart of the Matter, the End of the Affair and the Quiet American, reveal the private Greene which I have come to recognize from reading Sherry's all-consuming but awe-inspiring biography, Greene's own memoirs, and dozens of articles about Greene. The fictional and real life Greene is cynical, passionate, restless, melancholic, kind and intelligent all at once. He tends to side with the underdog and has shown through his writings a great sympathy for human foibles and folly. In this sense, he is a writer of great humanity. Sherry conveys the many facets of Greene's traits and personality vividly although his prose, alas, is a bit dry, and anything but elegant. It's rather ironic since his subject is a master of English prose.
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brushy_cat
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Clearly, I'm missing something. This was one of the most tedious books I've ever trawled through; it is not a biography, it is a partially digested mash of quotation from letters, journals, and books, with almost no synthesis or analysis whatsoever. This is clearly a conscious decision on Sherry's part, but it makes the book almost unreadable. Every tiny factoid is backed up with in-text quotation; nothing ever happens, but we are told about literally everything that happens through someone else's words. It could have been one fifth the length without losing anything other than the embarrassing style of Greene's love letters.

Why did he convert? Let's quote Greene, instead of actually thinking about it. Why did he go to Liberia? No particular reason is given in the letters, so let's assume there isn't one. Why Mexico? And so on. Greene led a truly interesting life, and Sherry makes approximately nothing of it. His conversion is recounted in the same style, and at the same length, as negotiations for books that he never published.

The only possible reasons for this are i) that Greene was alive when Sherry was writing, and Sherry felt obliged not to speculate about anything; and ii) Sherry did so much work and read so many tedious, over-egged letters and journals that he just had to stick it all somewhere. I might get through the next volume, because I'm genuinely interested in the man, but dearie me, the last volume is even longer than this one!
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phantombild
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Jesus Christ, the most incredible biography I've ever read.

I haven't read the other two (three?) volumes, but from what I understand Norman Sherry went slowly insane over the course of writing them and by the third volume he's like, "At 12:06 PM on January 3rd, Graham Greene had a bowel movement."

Ironically, that kind of obsessive attention to detail is what makes the first volume such a fascinating read.
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Joe_Med
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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Exhaustive and sometimes exhausting. I may need a book club just for this trilogy, the first part of which is consuming the second half of 2008 for me. Still, it's everything, everything, everything you ever wanted to know about the man. The slow pace is at times difficult but the revelations about Greene are well worth the investment.

January 11, 2009: I finished Volume I on the last day of 2008, aided by the Panamanian sun and the slightly alarmed encouragement of friends on holiday. NB: I don't think Sherry intended his books to be beach vacation reading. The historical context of Greene's early years, particularly his travels to Liberia and to Mexico, makes the first volume well worth the exercise. Onto Volume II, which clocks in at the comparably light 508 pages and promises much prurient provocation.
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Gandeloft
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
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The first volume of an extremely comprehensive biography of the complex British author Graham Greene. A fascinating read, if you're a fan, providing great insights into his novels.
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