Henry Green

British · 1905 to 1973

Born Henry Vincent Yorke on 29 October 1905 near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into a family with a substantial engineering business, he was educated at New Beacon School in Sevenoaks, then Eton College, then Magdalen College, Oxford, which he left in 1926 without taking a degree. That same year he published his first novel, Blindness, begun while he was still a schoolboy, under the pen name Henry Green, keeping his fiction separate from the family name attached to the firm he was about to join. He went to work on the factory floor of H. Pontifex and Sons, the family's Birmingham engineering works, rising eventually to managing director, and the shop floor gave him the material for his second novel, Living (1929), the same year he married his second cousin, the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph, known as Dig. Their son, Sebastian, was born in 1934. Party Going, a comedy of the rich stranded by fog at a railway station, followed in 1939. During the Second World War, Green served in the Auxiliary Fire Service in London through the Blitz, an experience he drew on for Caught and Back. Loving (1945), set among servants in a neutral Irish country house while the war rages unseen beyond it, became his most admired book and briefly a bestseller in America, though none of his nine novels ever sold widely. He published his last novel, Doting, in 1952 and then wrote no more fiction, turning instead to a private study of Ottoman history. Scant sales never dimmed his standing among other writers: W.H. Auden called him the best English novelist alive, and admirers included Evelyn Waugh, Rebecca West, and John Updike, who said Green's prose had shaped his own writing more than any other's. Increasingly reclusive and alcoholic in his last two decades, Green died in London on 13 December 1973, at the age of sixty-eight.