Combining literary acclaim with widespread popularity, Greene acquired a reputation early in his lifetime as a major writer, both of serious Catholic novels , and of thrillers or "entertainments" as he termed them. He was shortlisted for the Nobel Prize in Literature several times. Greene was awarded the Shakespeare Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. Several of his stories have been filmed, some more than once, and he collaborated with filmmaker Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol and The Third Man He converted to Catholicism in after meeting his future wife, Vivien Dayrell-Browning.
His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were first cousins , both members of a large, influential family that included the owners of Greene King Brewery , bankers, and statesmen; [ 14 ] his grandmother Jane Wilson was first cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson. I didn't want anyone to know of my discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Ballantyne's Coral Island for the train journey homeβalways an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley Graham also attended the school as a boarder.
Bullied and profoundly depressed, he made several suicide attempts, including, as he wrote in his autobiography, by Russian roulette and by taking aspirin before going swimming in the school pool. In , aged 16, in what was a radical step for the time, he was sent for psychoanalysis for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day student. Greene contributed several stories to the school magazine, [ 22 ] one of which was published by a London evening newspaper [ 23 ] in January He attended Balliol College, Oxford , to study history.
During Greene was for a short time a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain , and sought an invitation to the new Soviet Union , of which nothing came. Greene had periodic bouts of depression while at Oxford, and largely kept to himself. He certainly shared in none of our revelry. After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the Nottingham Journal , [ 25 ] and then as a sub-editor on The Times.
He published his first novel, The Man Within , in ; its favourable reception enabled him to work full-time as a novelist. The next two books, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall , were unsuccessful, [ 12 ] and he later disowned them. Although Greene objected to being described as a Roman Catholic novelist, rather than as a novelist who happened to be Catholic, [ a ] Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially Brighton Rock , The Power and the Glory , The Heart of the Matter , and The End of the Affair , [ 8 ] which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel.
