With its focus on matters of damnation and redemption, Brighton Rock is often considered Greene’s first “Catholic” novel. He died at age 86 of leukemia in Vevey, Switzerland.įor more on Pinkie and his gang, check out Greene’s 1936 thriller, A Gun for Sale, which acts in some ways as a prequel to Brighton Rock, in that it tells the story of Kite’s death, which sets the stage for Pinkie’s ascendance to the role of gang leader and the murder of Hale. He wrote more than twenty novels, including The Power and the Glory (widely considered his masterpiece), four travelogues, eight plays, ten screenplays, and more than fifty short stories. In 1947, he left Vivien and their two children, later proclaiming that his books were his true progeny. He also suffered from periodic bouts of depression and engaged in a number of extra-marital affairs. During World War II, he was recruited by his sister, Elisabeth, to join MI6 as a spy, and he spent much of his life traveling the world, using his experiences in foreign countries to inform his fiction. In 1929, Graham published his first novel, The Man Within, and the success of that book allowed him to work as a writer full-time. In 1926, he married Vivien Dayrell Browning, a Catholic, having converted to her faith. Upon graduation, he worked as a tutor and journalist for both the Nottingham Journal and The Times. As a boy, he attended a prestigious Berkhamsted boarding school, for which his father served as housemaster, and later went on to study at Oxford. Henry Graham Greene was born to a wealthy and influential family.

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