Happy Birthday #1

If forced to pick "my favorite novelist," I'd go with Graham Greene.

Graham Greene, "Greeneland"
by Steve King

On this day in 1904 Graham Greene was born. Greene's approach to Charles Dickens has been used as an approach to him: "the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share." In Greene's case, the early worldview for the long writing career was formed primarily at his boarding school in Berkhamsted. He was a shy, sensitive, unathletic boy going in, and son of the headmaster; the sneering and scoffing led to such torment that he ran away, attempted suicide, and entered psychoanalysis. The "Greeneland" in which his fictional fringe-dwellers, wanderers and tortured souls struggle to live -- one 1991 obituary said that "If Greene's key characters had been animals one cannot help feeling that they would have been compassionately put down" -- seems to have been created from such experiences.

More