Graham Greene

Born Henry Graham Greene on October 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the fourth of six children. His father, Charles Henry Greene, was headmaster of Berkhamsted School, and the boy's position as both the headmaster's son and a boarding student placed him in an impossible no-man's land between authority and the ruled, a divided loyalty that became one of the central themes of his fiction. At thirteen, bullied and deeply depressed, he played Russian roulette with his brother's revolver on at least six occasions, an episode he recounted in his memoir A Sort of Life (1971). He was sent to London for psychoanalysis, then went up to Balliol College, Oxford. While working as a sub-editor at The Times, he received a letter from a young Catholic woman named Vivien Dayrell-Browning, correcting him on a point of doctrine; he converted to Catholicism in 1926 and married her the following year. Brighton Rock (1938), a thriller that doubles as a theological meditation on damnation, announced his mature voice. The Power and the Glory (1940), The Heart of the Matter (1948), and The End of the Affair (1951) form an unofficial Catholic trilogy exploring sin, grace, and the terrible mercy of God. He traveled restlessly, to Liberia, Mexico, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba, Paraguay, and his novels followed: The Quiet American (1955), Our Man in Havana (1958), The Comedians (1966), The Honorary Consul (1973). He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize repeatedly but never won. In later life he called himself a "Catholic agnostic." He died of leukemia in Vevey, Switzerland, on April 3, 1991, at eighty-six.

In 1938 Greene traveled through Tabasco, Mexico, where the state had outlawed the priesthood and killed those who refused to renounce it. Locals told him of one priest who had existed ten years in the forest and swamps, venturing out only at night. Greene turned him into the whiskey priest of The Power and the Glory.