Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford he worked for four years as sub-editor on The Times. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, STAMBOUL TRAIN. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS and on his return was appointed film critic of The Spectator. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote THE LAWLESS ROADS and, later, his famous novel BRIGHTON ROCK was published in 1938. In 1940 he became literary editor of The Spectator.

As well as his many novels Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three works of autobiography, two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews.

Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in 1991.

One of the undisputed masters of English prose in the twentieth century, Graham Greene (1904-91) wrote tens of thousands of personal letters. This substantial volume presents a new and engrossing account of his life constructed out of his own words.

Meticulously chosen and engagingly annotated, this selection of Greene's letters, including many to his family and close friends that were unavailable even to his official biographer, gives an entirely new perspective on a life that combined literary achievement, political action, espionage, travel, and romantic entanglement.

The letters describe his travels in Mexico, Africa, Malaya, Vietnam, Haiti, Cuba and other trouble spots, where he observed the struggles of victims and victors with a compassionate and truthful eye.

The book includes a vast number of unpublished letters to Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Anthony Powell, Edith Sitwell, R. K. Narayan, Muriel Spark and other leading writers of the time. Some letters reveal the agonies of his romantic life, especially his relations with his wife, Vivien Greene, and with his mistress Catherine Walston.

The sheer range of experience contained in Greene's correspondence defies comparison.