AUTHORS & BOOKS
“There’s always a moment in childhood when a door opens and lets the future in.” ~Graham Greene.
You can tell who your favorite authors are because it is always such a delight to be in their company. That is, the measure of what music or books or movies are your favorites is demonstrated by how often you return to them, immerse yourself and re-savor them. One of my favorite authors has been Graham Greene.
Greene, 1904–1991, was a British novelist and Catholic whose works conveyed an unusual depth of insight into human character. His international settings offered fascinating backdrops for his stories, interesting to readers in much the same way Ripley’s Believe It Or Not anecdotes seemed to fascinate because of their foreign features.
Hence we find a Catholic priest struggling for survival in 1930’s Mexico during a time when the State was suppressing the Church (The Power and the Glory), and a jaded journalist in Viet Nam during the French occupation who encounters a young American idealist in a complicated love triangle that is metaphor for much more (The Quiet American), and a naive American writer of pulp fiction who is lured to post-WWII Vienna only to have his superficial naivete shredded in the face of the corruption of his friend Harry Lime (The Third Man).
