Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH (October 2, 1904 – April 3, 1991) was an English novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenplay writer, travel writer and critic whose works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world. Greene combined serious literary acclaim with wide popularity.

Although Greene objected strongly to being described as a "Catholic novelist" rather than as a "novelist who happened to be Catholic", Catholic religious themes are at the root of much of his writing, especially the four major Catholic novels: Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, and The Power and the Glory.[1] Works such as The Quiet American, Our Man in Havana and The Human Factor also show an avid interest in the workings of international politics and espionage.

Life and work
Henry Graham Greene
Born October 2, 1904(1904-10-02)
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom
Died April 3, 1991 (aged 86)
Vevey, Switzerland
Occupation Novelist, Playwright, Short story writer
Nationality British
Writing period 1932-1991
Debut works The Man Within

[edit] Childhood
Graham Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the fourth of six children — his younger brother Hugh became the Director-General of the BBC; elder brother Raymond was an eminent physician and mountaineer.

His parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Greene (née Raymond), were first cousins, members of a large, influential family that included the Greene King brewery owners, bankers, and businessmen. Charles Greene was Second Master at Berkhamsted School, the headmaster of which was Dr Thomas Fry (also married to a cousin of Charles). Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during World War II.

In 1910, Charles Greene succeeded Dr Fry as headmaster; Graham attended the school. Bullied and profoundly depressed as a boarder, he attempted suicide several times, some, he claimed, by Russian roulette; Michael Shelden's biography discredits that. In 1921, at age 17, he was psychoanalysed for six months in London, afterwards returning to school as a day boy; school friends included Claud Cockburn and Peter Quennell.

While an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, his first work, a volume of poorly received poetry entitled Babbling April, was published.[2][3]


[edit] Early career
After graduating with a second-class degree in history,[3] Greene unsuccessfully took up journalism, first in the city of Nottingham on the Nottingham Journal,[4] and then as a sub-editor on The Times. While in Nottingham he started corresponding with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Roman Catholic convert who had written him to correct him on a point of Catholic doctrine. Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926 (described in A Sort of Life) and was baptised in February the same year.[5] He married Dayrell-Browning in 1927, and they had two children, Lucy (b. 1933) and Francis (b. 1936; d. 1987). In 1948, Greene abandoned Vivien for Catherine Walston, yet remained married to his wife.


[edit] Novels and other works

The 2003 Penguin Classics edition of Greene's masterpiece The Power and the GloryGreene's first published novel was The Man Within (1929).[2] Favourable reception emboldened him to quit his sub-editor job at The Times and work as a full-time novelist, however, the next two books were unsuccessful; he later disowned them. His first, true success was Stamboul Train (1932), adapted as the film Orient Express (1934); as with this novel, many of his books would be cinematically adapted.

He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, and book and film reviews for The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine Night and Day, which folded in 1937 shortly after Greene's film review of Wee Willie Winkie, featuring nine-year-old Shirley Temple, cost the magazine a lost libel lawsuit. Greene's review claimed that Temple displayed "a certain adroit coquetry which appealed to middle-aged men"; it is now considered one of the first criticisms of the sexualisation of children for entertainment.

He originally divided his fiction in two genres: (i) thrillers (mystery and suspense books), such as The Ministry of Fear, that he described as entertainments; often with notable philosophic edges, and (ii) literary works, such as The Power and the Glory, on which he thought his literary reputation was to be based.[6]

As his career lengthened, however, both Greene and his readers found the distinction between the entertainments and the formal literary writing to become blurred. His later efforts, such as The Human Factor, The Comedians, Our Man in Havana, and The Quiet American, combine these modes in compressed, but remarkably insightful work. He also wrote the screenplay, and afterward the novella, for the now-classic film noir, The Third Man (1949).

Greene also wrote short stories and plays that were well-received, although he always was a novelist, foremost and he collected the 1948 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Heart of the Matter. His long, successful career and great readership (for a serious literary novelist) led to hope he would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; although considered in 1974, he was not awarded it. Greene's friend and occasional publisher, Michael Korda, wrote in his memoir, Another Life (1999), that Greene believed he was always one vote short of the prize, withheld by a judge who disliked his Catholicism and left-wing sympathies and "who seemed determined to outlive him".


[edit] Travel
Throughout his life, Graham Greene travelled far from England, to what he called the world's wild and remote places. The travels allowed him opportunity to spy on behalf of the United Kingdom, in Sierra Leone during the Second World War. Kim Philby, who would later be revealed as a Soviet double agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6.[7][8] As a novelist, he wove the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels.

Greene first left Europe at 31 years of age, in 1935, on a trip to Liberia that produced the travel book Journey Without Maps. His 1938 trip to Mexico, to see the effects of the government's campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was paid by the Roman Catholic Church. That voyage produced two books, the factual The Lawless Roads (published as Another Mexico in the U.S.), and the novel The Power and the Glory. In 1953, the Vatican office put pressure on Greene to change The Power and the Glory, though later, in a private audience with Greene, Pope Paul VI told him that although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should not pay attention to criticism from the Holy See.[9] Greene travelled to the Haiti of François Duvalier, alias "Papa Doc", where occurred the story of The Comedians (1966). On the lighter side, the owner of the Hotel Oloffson, in Port-au-Prince, where Greene frequently stayed, named a room in his honour.

“ There is so much weariness and disappointment in travel that people have to open up — in railway trains, over a fire, on the decks of steamers, and in the palm courts of hotels on a rainy day. They have to pass the time somehow, and they can pass it only with themselves. Like the characters in Chekhov they have no reserves — you learn the most intimate secrets. You get an impression of a world peopled by eccentrics, of odd professions, almost incredible stupidities, and, to balance them, amazing endurances. ”
—Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads, 1939



[edit] Final years
In 1966, Greene moved to Antibes, to be close to Yvonne Cloetta, whom he had known for years, a relationship that endured until his death. In 1981 he was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, awarded to writers concerned with the freedom of the individual in society. One of his final works, the pamphlet J'Accuse — The Dark Side of Nice (1982), concerns a legal matter embroiling him and his extended family in Nice. He declared that organized crime flourished in Nice, because the city's upper levels of civic government had protected judicial and police corruption; the accusation provoked a libel lawsuit he lost [1]. Yet, in 1994, he was vindicated — after death — when the former mayor of Nice, Jacques Médecin, was imprisoned upon conviction for corruption and associated crimes.

He lived the last years of his life in Vevey, on Lake Geneva, in Switzerland. His book Dr. Fischer of Geneva or the Bomb Party (1989) bases its themes on combined philosophic and geographic influences. He had ceased attending Mass and confessing in the 1950s, but received the sacraments from a Father Leopaldo Durán, a Spanish priest who became a friend. On dying at age 86 in 1991, he was buried in the Corsier-sur-Vevey cemetery.

His official biographer, Norman Sherry, published the third, final volume of The Life of Graham Greene in October of 2004. Sherry followed Greene's footsteps, at times suffering the diseases that Greene suffered and in the same place. The biography reveals that Greene continued reporting to British intelligence until his life's end, allowing literary scholars and readers to entertain the provocative question of whether Graham Greene was a novelist who also was a spy, or if he was a spy whose life-long novelist's career was the perfect cover.


[edit] Writing style and themes
This article or section is missing citations or needs footnotes.
Using inline citations helps guard against copyright violations and factual inaccuracies.

The literary style of Graham Greene was described by Evelyn Waugh in Commonweal as "not a specifically literary style at all. The words are functional, devoid of sensuous attraction, of ancestry, and of independent life".[10] This lean, realistic prose and readability was thought by Virginia Quarterly Review to be "the main business of holding the reader's attention."[10] His cinematic visual sense led to a number of his novels being made into films,[11] such as Brighton Rock in 1947, The End of the Affair in 1999, and The Quiet American in 1958 and 2002. Moreover, he also wrote several original screenplays, such as The Third Man in 1949. Yet, he concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives, the mental, emotional, and spiritual depths. Usually, they are deeply troubled with internal, existential struggles, are world-weary, and cynical, finding themselves rootlessly existing in seedy and sordid circumstances.[citation needed] The stories usually occurred in poor, hot, and dusty tropical backwaters in countries such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.[12]

The novels of Graham Greene often had religious themes at the centre. In his literary criticism, he attacked the modernist writers Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster for having lost the religious sense and for lacking such themes, which he argued, resulted in dull, superficial characters who: wandered about like cardboard symbols through a world that is paper-thin.[13] Only in recovering the religious element, the awareness of the drama of the struggle in the soul carrying the infinite consequences of salvation and damnation, and of the ultimate metaphysical realities of good and evil, sin and grace, could the novel recover its dramatic power. Suffering and unhappiness are omnipresent in the fallen world Greene depicts, and Catholicism is presented against a background of unvarying human evil, sin and doubt. Indeed, V. S. Pritchett praised Greene as the first English novelist since Henry James to present, and grapple with, the reality of evil.[14]

The novels often powerfully portray the Christian drama of the struggles within the individual soul from the Catholic perspective. Greene was criticised for certain tendencies in an unorthodox direction — in the world, sin is omnipresent to the degree that the vigilant struggle to avoid sinful conduct is doomed to failure, hence, not central to holiness. Friend and fellow Catholic writer Evelyn Waugh attacked that as a revival of the Quietist heresy. This aspect of his work also was criticised by the theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar as giving sin a mystique.

Greene responded that constructing a vision of pure faith and goodness in the novel was beyond his talents. Praise of Greene from an orthodox Catholic point of view, by Edward Short, is in Crisis magazine [2], and a mainstream Catholic critique is presented by Joseph Pearce.[15]

Catholicism's prominence decreased in the later writings. The supernatural realities that haunted the earlier work declined and was replaced with a humanistic perspective, a change reflected in his public criticism of orthodox Catholic teaching. Left-wing political critiques assumed greater importance in his novels, for example, he attacked the American policy in Vietnam in The Quiet American; the tormented believers portrayed were more likely to have faith in Communism than in Catholicism.

Unlike other "Catholic writers" such as Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, Greene's politics were always left-wing, though some biographers think politics mattered little to him.[citation needed] In his later years, he was a strong critic of American imperialism, and supported the Cuban leader Fidel Castro, whom he had met.[16] For Greene and politics, see also Anthony Burgess Politics in the Novels of Graham Greene[17] In Ways of Escape, reflections of his Mexican trip, he complained that Mexico's government was insufficiently left-wing when compared with Cuba's [18]. In Greene's opinion, “Conservatism and Catholicism should be .... impossible bedfellows”. [19].

“ In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths. ”
—Graham Greene


Nonetheless, despite his seriousness, Graham Greene greatly enjoyed parody, even of himself. In 1949, when the New Statesman magazine held a contest for parodies of Greene's distinctive writing style, he submitted a pseudonymous entry and won second prize; the first prize was awarded to a parody entered by his younger brother Hugh.[citation needed]

The resulting work, The Stranger's Hand, was later completed by another writer and cinematically rendered by the Italian film director Mario Soldati. In 1965, Greene again entered a similar New Statesman Graham Greene writing style parody contest, again pseudonymously, and that time won an honourable mention.


[edit] List of major works
See List of books by Graham Greene for all works.

Brighton Rock (1938)
The Power and the Glory (1940)
The Heart of the Matter (1948)
The Third Man (1949) (novella, as a basis for the screenplay}
The End of the Affair (1951)
The Quiet American (1955)
The Potting Shed (1957)
Ways of Escape (1980) (autobiography)

[edit] References
^ http://www.eclectica.org/v8n4/mcgowin_greene.html
^ a b http://www.bl.uk/collections/britirish/modbrigreene.html
^ a b http://www.notablebiographies.com/Gi-He/Greene-Graham.html
^ http://www.biogs.com/famous/greenegraham.html
^ The conversion happened after having argued with father Trollope, as Greene was defending atheism. - The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990. Introduction by John Updike, p. xiv
^ http://books.guardian.co.uk/authors/author/0,,-78,00.html
^ http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3226
^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/graham-greene.shtml
^ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1005484.stm
^ a b http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-destructors/crit.html
^ http://www.cinema.ucla.edu/calendar/calendardetails.aspx?details_type=2&id=147
^ http://www.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/AndrewPurssellArticle.htm
^ http://www.angelfire.com/journal/ggbtps/FrstThing.htm
^ Crisis Magazine.
^ http://www.catholicauthors.com/greene.html
^ Kirjasto.
^ in Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 2, No. 2, (Apr. 1967), pp. 93-99.
^ P.xii of John Updike's introduction to The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990.
^ As cited on p.xii of John Updike's introduction to The Power and the Glory New York: Viking, 1990.

[edit] Further reading
Paul O'Prey, A Reader's Guide to Graham Greene, Thames and Hudson, 1988
Kelly, Richard Michael, Graham Greene, Ungar, 1984
Kelly, Richard Michael, Graham Greene: A Study of the Short Fiction. Twayne, 1992.
Duran, Leopoldo , Graham Greene: Friend and Brother, translated by Euan Cameron, HarperCollins
Shelden, Michael , Graham Greene: The Man Within, (pub. William Heinemann, 1994), Random House ed. 1995: ISBN 0-679-42883-6
Sherry, Norman (1989-2004), The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 1 1904-1939, (pub. Random House UK, 1989, ISBN 0-224-02654-2), Viking ed. 1989: ISBN 0-670-81376-1, Penguin reprint 2004: ISBN 0-14-200420-0
Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 2 1939-1955, (pub. Viking 1994: ISBN 0-670-86056-5), Penguin reprint 2004: ISBN 0-14-200421-9
Sherry, Norman, The Life of Graham Greene: vol. 3 1955-1991, (pub. Viking 2004, ISBN 0-670-03142-9)
The Graham Greene Film Reader

Henry Green

For the 14th century English Chief Justice, see Henry Green (justice).
For the 19th century British Resident of the Orange River Sovereignty, see Henry Green (British Resident)
For the Chief Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, see Henry Green (Pennsylvania).
Henry Green was the nom de plume of Henry Vincent Yorke (October 29, 1905-December 13, 1973) . He was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, of an educated family with successful business interests in Birmingham. He went to Eton College and Oxford, which he left in 1926 without taking a degree. He served as a fireman during World War II. In his later years, Green became increasingly focused on studies of the Ottoman Empire and his lifelong passion for model trains. He is the author of numerous novels of social satire.

Henry Green was a friend of British novelist Graham Greene, whose real name was in fact Henry Graham Greene.


[edit] Bibliography
Blindness (1926)
Living (1929)
Party Going (1939)
Pack My Bag (1940)
Caught (1943)
Loving (1945)
Back (1946)
Concluding (1948)
Nothing (1950)
Doting (1952)
Surviving: the Uncollected Writings of Henry Green (1992)

Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray (December 26, 1716 – July 30, 1771), was an English poet, classical scholar and professor of Cambridge University. He was born in Cornhill, London, the son of an exchange broker and a milliner. He was the fifth of eight children and the only child in his family to survive infancy. He lived with his mother after she left his abusive father. He was educated at Eton College where his uncle was one of the masters. He recalled his schooldays as a time of great happiness, as is evident in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Gray was a delicate and naturally scholarly boy who spent his time reading great literature and avoiding athletics. Probably fortunately for himself, he was able to live in his uncle’s household rather than in college. He made three close friends: Horace Walpole, son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Thomas Ashton and Richard West. The four of them prided themselves on their sense of style, their sense of humour and their appreciation of beauty.

In 1734, Gray went to Cambridge. At first he stayed in Pembroke College, moving to Peterhouse, but he found the curriculum dull. He wrote letters to his friends listing all the things he disliked: the masters (mad with Pride) and the Fellows (sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things.) Supposedly he was intended for the law, but in fact he spent his time as an undergraduate reading classical and modern literature and playing Vivaldi and Scarlatti on the harpsichord for relaxation. In 1738 he accompanied his old school-friend Horace Walpole on his Grand Tour, probably at Walpole's expense. They fell out and parted in Tuscany because Walpole wanted to attend fashionable parties and Gray wanted to visit all the antiquities. However, they were reconciled a few years later.

He began seriously writing poems in 1742, mainly after his close friend Richard West died. He moved to Cambridge and began a self-imposed programme of literary study, becoming one of the most learned men of his time, though he claimed to be lazy by inclination. He became a Fellow first of Peterhouse, and later of Pembroke College, Cambridge. It is said that the change of college was the result of a practical joke: Terrified of fire, he had installed a metal bar by his window on the top floor of the Burrough’s building at Peterhouse, so that in the event of a fire he could tie his sheets to it and climb to safety. One night undergraduates decided to play a prank and shouted “fire”. Gray climbed down from his window, landing in a barrel of water placed beneath.[citation needed]

Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge, and only later in his life did he begin travelling again. Although he was one of the least productive poets (his collected works published during his lifetime amount to less than 1,000 lines), he is regarded as the predominant poetic figure of the mid-18th century. In 1757, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, which he refused. In 1768, he succeeded Lawrence Brockett as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, a sinecure.

Gray was so self critical and fearful of failure that he only published thirteen poems during his lifetime, and once wrote that he feared his collected works would be mistaken for the works of a flea. Gray’s friend Walpole said that He never wrote anything easily but things of Humour, and this is evident in the mock elegy he wrote to commemorate the death by drowning of Walpole’s cat, Ode on the death of a favourite Cat, drowned in a tub of Gold fishes. Walpole later displayed the fatal china vase on a pedestal at his house in Strawberry Hill. Gray’s surviving letters also show his sharp observation and his playful sense of humour.

Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (written 1750 , published Feb 1751 by Dodsley), believed to have been written in the churchyard of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, was a literary sensation when it was published and has become a lasting contribution to English literary heritage. Its reflective, calm and stoic tone was greatly admired, and it was pirated, imitated, quoted and translated into Latin and Greek. It is still one of the most popular and most frequently quoted poems in the English language. Before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, British General James Wolfe is said to have recited it to his officers, adding: "Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec tomorrow". The poem's famous depiction of an "ivy-mantled tow'r" could be a reference to the early-mediaeval St Laurence's Church in Upton, Slough.

Gray combined traditional forms and poetic diction with new topics and modes of expression and may be considered as a classically focussed precursor of the romantic revival.


Tomb of Thomas Gray in Stoke Poges ChurchyardThe Elegy was recognised immediately for its beauty and skill, and the Churchyard Poets are so named because they wrote in the shadow of Gray's great poem. It contains many outstanding phrases which have entered the common English lexicon, either on their own or as referenced in other works. A few of these include:

"Far from the madding crowd"
"The paths of glory"
"Celestial fire"
"The unlettered muse"
"Kindred spirit"
Gray also wrote light verse, such as Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, concerning Horace Walpole's cat, which had recently died trying to fish goldfish out of a bowl. After setting the scene with the couplet "What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse to fish?", the poem moves to its multiple proverbial conclusion: "a fav'rite has no friend", "[k]now one false step is ne'er retrieved" and ""nor all that glisters, gold".

He is also well known for his statement that "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," from his 1742 Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

Gray himself considered that his two Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, were his best works. Pindaric odes are written with great fire and passion, unlike the calmer and more reflective Horatian odes such as Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College. The Bard tells of a wild Welsh poet cursing Edward I after the conquest of Wales and prophesying in detail the downfall of the house of Plantagenet. It is very melodramatic, and ends with the bard hurling himself to his death from the top of a mountain.

When his duties allowed, Gray travelled widely throughout Britain to places like Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Scotland in search of picturesque scenery and ancient monuments. These things were not generally valued in the early eighteenth century, when the popular taste ran to classical styles in architecture and literature and people liked their scenery tame and well-tended. Some people have seen Gray’s writings on this topic, and the Gothic details that appear in his Elegy and The Bard as the first foreshadowing of the Romantic movement that dominated the early nineteenth century, when William Wordsworth and the other Lake poets had taught people to value the picturesque, the sublime and the Gothic.

Interestingly, however, Gray's connection to Wordsworth is vexed. In the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, it is Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West" which Wordsworth singles out to exemplify what he finds most objectionable in poetry. He even goes so far as to castigate West as "at the head of those who by their reasonings have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition, and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction."

When Gray died in 1771, he was buried beside his mother in the graveyard of the church in Stoke Poges which was the setting for his Elegy. His grave can still be seen there today. There is a plaque in Cornhill, marking the place where he was born.

Robert Graves

Robert von Ranke Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985) was an English poet, scholar, and novelist. During his long life, he produced more than 140 works. He was the son of the Anglo-Irish writer Alfred Perceval Graves and Amalie von Ranke. The historian Leopold von Ranke was his mother's uncle. He was the brother of the author Charles Patrick Graves.

Graves considered himself a poet first and foremost. His poems, together with his innovative interpretation of the Greek Myths, his memoir of the First World war, Good-bye to All That, and his historical study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, have never been out of print. He earned his living from writing, particularly popular historical novels such as I, Claudius, The Golden Fleece and Count Belisarius. He was also a prominent translator of Classical Latin and Ancient Greek texts; his versions of The Twelve Caesars and The Golden Ass remain popular today for their clarity and entertaining style. Graves was awarded the 1934 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for both I, Claudius and Claudius the God.

Biography

[edit] Early life and WWI
Born in Wimbledon, Graves received his early education at King's College School and Copthorne Prep School, Wimbledon and Charterhouse School and won a scholarship to St John's College, Oxford. At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Graves enlisted almost immediately, taking a commission in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers (RWF). He published his first volume of poems, Over the Brazier, in 1916. He developed an early reputation as a war poet, and was one of the first to write realistic poems about his experience of front line conflict. In later years he omitted his war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously 'part of the war poetry boom'. At the Battle of the Somme he was so badly wounded he was expected to die, and indeed was officially reported as died of wounds. He gradually recovered, however, and apart from a brief spell back in France, he spent the remainder of the war in England.

One of Graves's closest friends at this time was the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who like Graves was an officer in the RWF. In 1917 Sassoon tried to rebel against the war by making a public anti-war statement. Graves, who feared Sassoon could face a court martial, intervened with the military authorities and persuaded them that he was suffering from shell shock, and to treat him accordingly. As a result Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart, the military hospital near Edinburgh, where he was treated by Dr Rivers and met fellow patient Wilfred Owen. Graves also suffered from shell shock, or neurasthenia as it is sometimes called, though was never hospitalised for it.

Graves's biographies document the story well, and it is fictionalised in Pat Barker's novel Regeneration. The intensity of their early relationship is nowhere demonstrated more clearly than in Graves's collection Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), which contains a plethora of poems celebrating their friendship. Sassoon himself remarked upon a "heavy sexual element" within it, an observation supported by the sentimental nature of much of the surviving correspondence between the two men. Through Sassoon, Graves also became friends with Wilfred Owen, whose talent he recognised. Owen attended Graves's wedding to Nancy Nicholson in 1918, presenting him with, as Graves recalled, "a set of twelve Apostle spoons".

Following his marriage and the end of World War I, Graves belatedly took up his scholarship at St John's College, Oxford. He later attempted to make a living by running a small shop, but the business soon failed. In 1926 he took up a post at Cairo University, accompanied by his wife, their children, and the poet Laura Riding. He returned to London briefly, where he split up with his wife under highly emotional circumstances (at one point Riding attempted suicide) before leaving to live with Riding in Deià, Majorca. There they continued to publish letterpress books under the rubric of the Seizin Press, founded and edited the literary journal Epilogue, and wrote two successful academic books together: A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928); both had great influence on modern literary criticism, particularly new criticism.


[edit] Literary career

Cover of I, Claudius DVDIn 1927, he also published Lawrence and the Arabs, a commercially successful biography of T. E. Lawrence. Good-bye to All That (1929, revised by him and republished in 1957) proved a success but cost him many of his friends, notably Siegfried Sassoon. In 1934 he published his most commercially successful work, I, Claudius. Using classical sources he constructed a complex and compelling tale of the life of the Roman emperor Claudius, a tale extended in the sequel Claudius the God (1935). Another historical novel by Graves, Count Belisarius (1938), recounts the career of the Byzantine general Belisarius.

Graves and Riding left Majorca in 1936 at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, they moved to the United States and took lodging in New Hope, Pennsylvania. Their volatile relationship was described in non-fiction by Richard Perceval Graves in Robert Graves: 1927-1940, The Years with Laura and T.S. Matthews' book Jacks or Better (1977), and also was the basis for Miranda Seymour's novel The Summer of '39 (1998). After returning to England, Graves began a new relationship with Beryl Hodge, then the wife of Alan Hodge, his collaborator on The Long Week-End (1941) and The Reader Over Your Shoulder (1943; republished in 1947 as The Use and Abuse of the English Language).

In 1946 he and his new wife Beryl re-established a home in Deya, Majorca. 1946 also saw the publication of the historical novel King Jesus. He published the controversial The White Goddess in 1948. He turned to science fiction with "Seven Days in New Crete" (1949), and in 1953 he published The Nazarene Gospel Restored with Joshua Podro. In 1955, he published his version of The Greek Myths, which continues to dominate the English-language market for mythography despite its poor reputation among classicists[1] - a reputation that is perhaps unsurprising given the unconventional nature of his interpretations and his own open and scathing opinion of literary scholars.[2] In 1956, he published a volume of short stories Catacrok! Mostly Stories, Mostly Funny. In 1961 he became professor of poetry at Oxford, a post he held until 1966.

From the 1960s until his death, Robert Graves frequently exchanged letters with Spike Milligan. Many of their letters to each other are collected in the book, "Dear Robert, Dear Spike."[3]

Graves died in December 1985 at the age of 90, following a long illness and gradual mental degeneration. He and Beryl are buried in the small churchyard on the hill in Deia, overlooking the sea on the northwest coast of Majorca.

Graves had eight children: Jenny, David, Catherine (who married nuclear scientist Clifford Dalton) and Sam with Nancy Nicholson, and William, Lucia (herself a translator), Juan and Tomas with Beryl Graves.[4]


[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Poetry
Over the Brazier. London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1916; New York: St Martins Press, 1975.
Goliath and David. London: Chiswick Press, 1917.
Fairies and Fusiliers. London: William Heinemann,1917; New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1918.
Treasure Box. London: Chiswick Press, 1920.
Country Sentiment. London: Martin Secker, 1920; New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1920.
The Pier-Glass. London: Martin Secker, 1921; New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1921.
Whipperginny. London: William Heinemann, 1923; New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1923.
The Feather Bed. Richmond, Surrey: Hogarth Press, 1923.
Mock Beggar Hall. London: Hogarth Press, 1924.
Welchmans Hose. London: The Fleuron, 1925.
Poems. London: Ernest Benn, 1925.
The Marmosites Miscellany (as John Doyle). London: Hogarth Press, 1925.
Poems (1914-1926). London: William Heinemann, 1927; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1929.
Poems (1914-1927). London: William Heinemann, 1927 (as Westminster Press, 1928.
Poems 1929. London: Seizin Press, 1929.
Ten Poems More. Paris: Hours Press, 1930.
Poems 1926-1930. London: William Heinemann, 1931.
To Whom Else? Deyá, Mallorca: Seizin Press, 1931.
Poems 1930-1933. London: Arthur Barker, 1933.
Collected Poems. London: Cassell, 1938; New York: Random House, 1938.
No More Ghosts: Selected Poems. London: Faber & Faber, 1940.
Work in Hand, with Norman Cameron and Alan Hodge. London: Hogarth Press, 1942.
Poems. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1943.
Poems 1938-1945. London: Cassell, 1945; New York: Creative Age Press, 1946.
Collected Poems (1914-1947). London: Cassell, 1948.
Poems and Satires. London: Cassell, 1951.
Poems 1953. London: Cassell, 1953.
Collected Poems 1955. New York: Doubleday, 1955.
Poems Selected by Himself. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957; rev. 1961, 1966, 1972, 1978.
The Poems of Robert Graves. New York: Doubleday, 1958.
Collected Poems 1959. London: Cassell, 1959.
The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children. London: Cassell, 1960; New York: Doubleday, 1961.
More Poems 1961. London: Cassell, 1961.
Collected Poems. New York: Doubleday, 1961.
New Poems 1962. London: Cassell, 1962; as New Poems. New York: Doubleday, 1963.
The More Deserving Cases: Eighteen Old Poems for Reconsideration. Marlborough: Marlborough College Press, 1962.
Man Does, Woman Is. London: Cassell, 1964; New York: Doubleday, 1964.
Ann at Highwood Hall: Poems for Children. London: Cassell, 1964.
Love Respelt. London: Cassell, 1965; New York: Doubleday, 1966.
Collected Poems 1965. London: Cassell, 1965.
Seventeen Poems Missing from 'Love Respelt'. privately printed, 1966.
Colophon to 'Love Respelt'. Privately printed, 1967.
Poems 1965-1968. London: Cassell, 1968; New York: Doubleday, 1969.
Poems About Love. London: Cassell, 1969; New York: Doubleday, 1969.
Love Respelt Again. New York: Doubleday, 1969.
Beyond Giving. privately printed, 1969.
Poems 1968-1970. London: Cassell, 1970; New York: Doubleday, 1971.
The Green-Sailed Vessel. privately printed, 1971.
Poems: Abridged for Dolls and Princes. London: Cassell, 1971.
Poems 1970-1972. London: Cassell, 1972; New York: Doubleday, 1973.
Deyá, A Portfolio. London: Motif Editions, 1972.
Timeless Meeting: Poems. privately printed, 1973.
At the Gate. privately printed, London, 1974.
Collected Poems 1975. London: Cassell, 1975.
New Collected Poems. New York: Doubleday, 1977.
Selected Poems. ed Paul O'Prey. London: Penguin, 1986
The Centenary Selected Poems. ed. Patrick Quinn. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995.
Complete Poems Volume 1. ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995.
Complete Poems Volume 2. ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1996.
Complete Poems Volume 3. ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1999.
The Complete Poems in One Volume ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000.

[edit] Fiction
My Head! My Head!. London: Sucker, 1925; Alfred. A. Knopf, New York, 1925.
The Shout. London: Mathews & Marrot, 1929.
No Decency Left (with Laura Riding) (as Barbara Rich). London: Jonathan Cape, 1932.
The Real David Copperfield. London: Arthur Barker, 1933; as David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens, Condensed by Robert Graves, ed. M. P. Paine. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934.
I, Claudius. London: Arthur Barker, 1934; New York: Smith & Haas, 1934.
Sequel: Claudius the God and his Wife Messalina. London: Arthur Barker, 1934; New York: Smith & Haas, 1935.
Antigua, Penny, Puce. Deyá, Mallorca/London: Seizin Press/Constable, 1936; New York: Random House, 1937.
Count Belisarius. London: Cassell, 1938: Random House, New York, 1938.
Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth. London: Methuen, 1940; as Sergeant Lamb's America. New York: Random House, 1940.
Sequel: Proceed, Sergeant Lamb. London: Methuen, 1941; New York: Random House, 1941.
The Story of Marie Powell: Wife to Mr. Milton. London: Cassell, 1943; as Wife to Mr Milton: The Story of Marie Powell. New York: Creative Age Press, 1944.
The Golden Fleece. London: Cassell, 1944; as Hercules, My Shipmate, New York: Creative Age Press, 1945.
King Jesus. New York: Creative Age Press, 1946; London: Cassell, 1946.
Watch the North Wind Rise. New York: Creative Age Press, 1949; as Seven Days in New Crete. London: Cassell, 1949.
The Islands of Unwisdom. New York: Doubleday, 1949; as The Isles of Unwisdom. London: Cassell, 1950.
Homer's Daughter. London: Cassell, 1955; New York: Doubleday, 1955.
Catacrok! Mostly Stories, Mostly Funny. London: Cassell, 1956.
They Hanged My Saintly Billy. London: Cassell, 1957; New York: Doubleday, 1957.
Collected Short Stories. Doubleday: New York, 1964; Cassell, London, 1965.
An Ancient Castle. London: Peter Owen, 1980.

[edit] Other works
On English Poetry. New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1922; London: Heinemann, 1922.
The Meaning of Dreams. London: Cecil Palmer, 1924; New York: Greenberg, 1925.
Poetic Unreason and Other Studies. London: Cecil Palmer, 1925.
Contemporary Techniques of Poetry: A Political Analogy. London: Hogarth Press, 1925.
Another Future of Poetry. London: Hogarth Press, 1926.
Impenetrability or The Proper Habit of English. London: Hogarth Press, 1927.
The English Ballad: A Short Critical Survey. London: Ernest Benn, 1927; revised as English and Scottish Ballads. London: William Heinemann, 1957; New York: Macmillan, 1957.
Lars Porsena or The Future of Swearing and Improper Language. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1927; E.P. Dutton, New York, 1927; revised as The Future of Swearing and Improper Language. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1936.
A Survey of Modernist Poetry (with Laura Riding). London: William Heinemann, 1927; New York: Doubleday, 1928.
Lawrence and the Arabs. London: Jonathan Cape, 1927; as Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure. New York: Doubleday, 1928.
A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (with Laura Riding). London: Jonathan Cape, 1928; as Against Anthologies. New York: Doubleday, 1928.
Mrs. Fisher or The Future of Humour. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1928.
Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929; New York: Jonathan Cape and Smith, 1930; rev., New York: Doubleday, 1957; London: Cassell, 1957; Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960.
But It Still Goes On: An Accumulation. London: Jonathan Cape, 1930; New York: Jonathan Cape and Smith, 1931.
T. E. Lawrence to His Biographer Robert Graves. New York: Doubleday, 1938; London: Faber & Faber, 1939.
The Long Weekend (with Alan Hodge). London: Faber & Faber, 1940; New York: Macmillan, 1941.
The Reader Over Your Shoulder (with Alan Hodge). London: Jonathan Cape, 1943; New York: Macmillan, 1943.
The White Goddess. London: Faber & Faber, 1948; New York: Creative Age Press, 1948; rev., London: Faber & Faber, 1952, 1961; New York: Alfred. A. Knopf, 1958.
The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry 1922-1949. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949.
Occupation: Writer. New York: Creative Age Press, 1950; London: Cassell, 1951.
The Nazarene Gospel Restored (with Joshua Podro). London: Cassell, 1953; New York: Doubleday, 1954.
The Greek Myths. London: Penguin, 1955; Baltimore: Penguin, 1955.
The Crowning Privilege: The Clark Lectures, 1954-1955. London: Cassell, 1955; New York: Doubleday, 1956.
Adam's Rib. London: Trianon Press, 1955; New York: Yoseloff, 1958.
Jesus in Rome (with Joshua Podro). London: Cassell, 1957.
Steps. London: Cassell, 1958.
5 Pens in Hand. New York: Doubleday, 1958.
Food for Centaurs. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
Greek Gods and Heroes. New York: Doubleday, 1960; as Myths of Ancient Greece. London: Cassell, 1961.
Selected Poetry and Prose (ed. James Reeves). London: Hutchinson, 1961.
Oxford Addresses on Poetry. London: Cassell, 1962; New York: Doubleday, 1962.
The Siege and Fall of Troy. London: Cassell, 1962; New York: Doubleday, 1963.
The Big Green Book. New York: Crowell Collier, 1962; Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1978. Illustrated by Maurice Sendak
Hebrew Myths. The Book of Genesis (with Raphael Patai). New York: Doubleday, 1964; London: Cassell, 1964.
Majorca Observed. London: Cassell, 1965; New York: Doubleday, 1965.
Mammon and the Black Goddess. London: Cassell, 1965; New York: Doubleday, 1965.
Two Wise Children. New York: Harlin Quist, 1966; London: Harlin Quist, 1967.
Poetic Craft and Principle. London: Cassell, 1967.
The Poor Boy Who Followed His Star. London: Cassell, 1968; New York: Doubleday, 1969.
Greek Myths and Legends. London: Cassell, 1968.
The Crane Bag. London: Cassell, 1969.
On Poetry: Collected Talks and Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1969.
Difficult Questions, Easy Answers. London: Cassell, 1972; New York: Doubleday, 1973.
In Broken Images: Selected Letters 1914-1946. ed Paul O'Prey. London: Hutchinson, 1982
Between Moon and Moon: Selected Letters 1946-1972. ed Paul O'Prey. London: Hutchinson, 1984
Collected Writings on Poetry. ed. Paul O'Prey, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1995.
Some Speculations on Literature, History, and Religion. ed Patrick Quinn, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2000.

[edit] Notes
^ "[it] makes attractive reading and conveys much solid information, but should be approached with extreme caution nonetheless," Robin Hard, H.J. Rose, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology, ISBN 0415186366, p. 690
^ The White Goddess, Farrar Strauss Giroud, p. 224. ISBN 0-374-50493-8
^ National Library of Australia NLA News June 2002 Volume XII Number 9, retrieved 15 June 2007 [1]
^ "Obituary - Beryl Graves, The Guardian, 1 November 2003, retrieved 15 May 2007.[2]

Kenneth Grahame

Kenneth Grahame (March 8, 1859 – July 6, 1932) was a British writer, mainly of the sort of fiction and fantasy written for children but enjoyed equally if not more by adults. He is most famous for The Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the classics of children's literature. He also wrote The Reluctant Dragon, which was much later adapted into a Disney movie.

Life
Grahame was born in Edinburgh, Scotland but in early childhood, after being orphaned, moved to live with his grandmother on the banks of the River Thames in southern England. He was an outstanding pupil at St Edward's School in Oxford and wanted to attend Oxford University but was not allowed to do so by his guardian on grounds of cost. Instead he was sent to work at the Bank of England in 1879, and rose through the ranks until retiring as its Secretary in 1907 due to ill health. He was shot during an unsuccessful bank robbery a few years earlier, which may have precipitated his retirement.[citation needed]

Grahame's marriage to Elspeth Thomson was an unhappy one. They had only one child, a boy named Alastair, who was born blind in one eye and was plagued by health problems throughout his short life. Alastair eventually committed suicide on a railway track while an undergraduate at Oxford University, two days before his 20th birthday. Out of respect for Kenneth Grahame, Alastair's demise was recorded as an accidental death.[when? — see talk page]

Kenneth Grahame died in Pangbourne, Berkshire in 1932. He is buried in Holywell Cemetery, Oxford, near the grave of the American expatriate author James Blish. Grahame's cousin Anthony Hope wrote his epitaph, which reads: "To the beautiful memory of Kenneth Grahame, husband of Elspeth and father of Alastair, who passed the River on the 6 July 1932, leaving childhood and literature through him the more blest for all time".[1]


[edit] Works

Kenneth Grahame's grave stone.While still a young man, Grahame began to publish light stories in London periodicals such as the St. James Gazette. Some of these stories were collected and published as Pagan Papers in 1893, and, two years later, The Golden Age. These were followed by Dream Days in 1898, which contains The Reluctant Dragon. There is a parallel here to the great comic writer P.G. Wodehouse a generation later, also forced to work in a bank through lack of funds to go to university, also turning his hand to writing for amusement, also still in print and much loved a century later.

There is a ten-year gap between Grahame's penultimate book and the publication of his triumph, The Wind in the Willows. During this decade Grahame became a father. The wayward headstrong nature he saw in his little son he transformed into the swaggering Toad of Toad Hall, one of its four principal characters. Despite its success, he never attempted a sequel. Others, years after his death, have done that for him. The book was a hit and is still enjoyed by adults and children today, whether in book form or in the films.


[edit] Bibliography
Pagan Papers (1893)
The Golden Age (1895)
Dream Days (1898)
Including The Reluctant Dragon (1989)
The Headswoman (1898)
The Wind in the Willows (1908)

[edit] Trivia
Peter Green, the historian of Hellenistic Greece wrote a biography of Grahame in 1959 entitled "Kenneth Grahame 1859-1932" and subsequently wrote the introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition of "The Wind in the Willows".


[edit] References
^ Carpenter, Humphrey; Mari Prichard (1991). The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 216-219. ISBN 0-19-211582-0.

Elizabeth Goudge

Elizabeth Goudge (April 24, 1900 – April 1, 1984) was an English author of novels, short stories and children's books.

Born in Wells, she moved with her family to Ely when her father, a clergyman, was transferred there. When her father, Henry Leighton Goudge, was made Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, the family left Ely and went to Christ Church, Oxford.

Goudge's first book, The Fairies' Baby and Other Stories (1919), was a failure and it was several years before she authored Island Magic (1934), which is based on Channel Island stories, many of which she had learned from her mother, who was from Guernsey.

Goudge was awarded the Carnegie Medal for The Little White Horse (1946), the book which J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter stories, has said was her favorite as a child. The television mini-series Moonacre was based on The Little White Horse. Her Green Dolphin Country (1944) was published in the US as Green Dolphin Street, and was made into a film with this title which won the Academy Award for Special Effects in 1948.

A Diary of Prayer (1966) was one of Goudge's last works. She spent her last years in her cottage on Peppard Common, just outside Henley-on-Thames.

Bibliography

[edit] City of Bells series
A City of Bells (1936)
Towers in the Mist (1938)
The Dean's Watch (1960)
Three Cities of Bells (omnibus) (1965)

[edit] Eliots of Damerosehay series
The Bird in the Tree (1940)
The Herb of Grace (1948) aka Pilgrim's Inn
The Heart of the Family (1953)
The Eliots of Damerosehay (omnibus) (1957)

[edit] Novels
Island Magic (1934)
The Middle Window (1935)
The Castle on the Hill (1941)
Green Dolphin Country (1944) aka Green Dolphin Street (USA title)
Gentian Hill (1949)
The Rosemary Tree (1956)
The White Witch (1958)
The Scent of Water (1963)
The Child From the Sea (1970)

[edit] Children's books
Sister of the Angels: A Christmas Story (1939)
Smokey House (1940)
The Well of the Star (1941)
Henrietta's House (1942) aka The Blue Hills
The Little White Horse (1946)
Make-Believe (1949)
The Valley of Song (1951)
Linnets and Valerians (1964) aka The Runaways
I Saw Three Ships (1969)

[edit] Collections
The Fairies' Baby: And Other Stories (1919)
A Pedlar's Pack: And Other Stories (1937)
Three Plays: Suomi, The Brontës of Haworth, Fanny Burney (1939)
The Golden Skylark: And Other Stories (1941)
The Ikon on the Wall: And Other Stories (1943)
The Elizabeth Goudge Reader (1946)
Songs and Verses (1947)
At the Sign of the Dolphin (1947)
The Reward of Faith: And Other Stories (1950)
White Wings: Collected Short Stories (1952)
The Ten Gifts: An Elizabeth Goudge Anthology (1965)
A Christmas Book: An Anthology of Christmas Stories (1967)
The Lost Angel: Stories (1971)
Hampshire Trilogy (omnibus) (1976)
Pattern of People: An Elizabeth Goudge Anthology (1978)

[edit] Non fiction
God So Loved the World: The Story of Jesus (1951)
Saint Francis of Assisi (1959) aka My God and My All: The Life of St. Francis of Assisi
A Diary of Prayer (1966)
The Joy of the Snow: An Autobiography (1974)

[edit] Anthologies edited by Elizabeth Goudge
A Book of Comfort: An Anthology (1964)
A Book of Peace: An Anthology (1967)
A Book of Faith: An Anthology (1976)

[edit] Anthologies containing stories by Elizabeth Goudge
Dancing with the Dark (1997)

[edit] Short stories
ESP (1974)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Goudge"

William Golding

Sir William Gerald Golding (19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993) was a British novelist, poet and Nobel Prize for Literature laureate best known for his novel Lord of the Flies. He was also awarded the Booker Prize for literature in 1980, for his novel Rites of Passage, the first book of the trilogy To the Ends of the Earth.

Biography

[edit] Early life
Golding was born at his maternal grandmother's house, 47 Mountwise, St Columb Minor, Newquay, Cornwall[1] , and he spent many childhood holidays there. He grew up at his family home in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where his father was a science master at Marlborough Grammar School (1905 to retirement). Alec Golding was a socialist with a strong commitment to scientific rationalism, and the young Golding and his elder brother Joseph attended the school where his father taught (not to be confused with Marlborough College, the "public" boarding school). His mother, Mildred,kept house at 29, The Green, Marlborough, and supported the moderate campaigners for female suffrage. In 1930 Golding went up to Oxford University as an undergraduate at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he read Natural Sciences for two years before transferring to English Literature. He took his B.A. (Hons) Second Class in the summer of 1934, and later that year his first book, Poems, was published in London by Macmillan & Co, through the help of his Oxford friend, the anthroposophist Adam Bittleston.


[edit] Marriage and family
Golding married Ann Brookfield on 30th September 1939 and they had two children, Judy and David.[1]


[edit] War service
During World War II, Golding fought in the Royal Navy and was briefly involved in the pursuit of Germany's mightiest battleship, the Bismarck. He also participated in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day, and at war's end returned to teaching and writing.[1]


[edit] Death
In 1985 Golding and his wife moved to Perranarworthal, near Truro, Cornwall, where he died of heart failure on June 19, 1993. He was buried in the village churchyard at Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, England. He left the draft of a novel, The Double Tongue, set in Ancient Delphi, which was published posthumously.[2][3]


[edit] Career

[edit] Writing success
In September 1953 Golding sent the typescript of a book to Faber & Faber of London. Initially rejected by a reader there, the book was championed by Charles Monteith, then a new editor at the firm, and was published in September 1954 as Lord of the Flies. It was shortly followed by other novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, and Free Fall.

Publishing success made it possible for Golding to resign his teaching post in 1961, and he spent that academic year as writer-in-residence at Hollins College near Roanoke, Virginia. Having moved in 1958 from Salisbury to nearby Bowerchalke, he met his fellow villager and walking companion James Lovelock. The two discussed Lovelock's hypothesis that the living matter of the planet Earth functions like a single organism, and Golding suggested naming this hypothesis after Gaia, the goddess of the earth in Greek mythology.

In 1970 Golding was a candidate for the Chancellorship of the University of Kent at Canterbury, but lost to Jo Grimond. Golding won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1979, the Booker Prize in 1980, and in 1983 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.


[edit] Fiction
Golding's often allegorical fiction makes broad use of allusions to classical literature, mythology, and Christian symbolism. No distinct thread unites his novels, and the subject matter and technique vary. His first novel, Lord of the Flies (1954; film, 1963 and 1990, play, adapted by Nigel Williams, 1995), dealt with an unsuccessful struggle against barbarism and war, thus showing the ambiguity and fragility of civilization. The Inheritors (1955) looked back into prehistory, advancing the thesis that humankind's evolutionary ancestors, "the new people" (generally identified with homo sapiens sapiens), triumphed over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) as much by violence and deceit as by natural superiority.

Golding's later novels include Darkness Visible (1979), The Paper Men (1984), and the comic-historical sea trilogy To the Ends of the Earth (BBC TV 2005), comprising the Booker Prize-winning Rites of Passage (1980), Close Quarters (1987), and Fire Down Below (1989).


[edit] Cryptozoology
William Golding was also prominent among Loch Ness Monster theorists and wrote articles for Popular Science about the nature of this purported phenomenon. [4]


[edit] Major works
Poems (1934)
Lord of the Flies (1954)
The Inheritors (1955)
Pincher Martin (1956)
The Brass Butterfly (play) (1958)
Free Fall (1959)
The Spire (1964)
The Hot Gates (essays) (1965)
The Pyramid (1967)
The Scorpion God (1971)
Darkness Visible (1979)
A Moving Target (essays) (1982)
Nessie- The Legend (article) (1982)
The Paper Men (1984)
An Egyptian Journal (1985)
To the Ends of the Earth (trilogy)
Rites of Passage (1980)
Close Quarters (1987)
Fire Down Below (1989)
The Double Tongue (posthumous) (1996)

[edit] See also
Novels by William Golding

[edit] References
^ a b c Kevin McCarron, ‘Golding, Sir William Gerald (1911–1993)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2006 accessed 13 Nov 2007
^ Golding, William (1996). The Double Tongue. London: Faber. ISBN 9780571178032.
^ Bruce Lambert. "William Golding Is Dead at 81; The Author of 'Lord of the Flies'", The New York Times, 20 June 1993. Retrieved on 2007-09-06.
^ 3. Nessie- Fact or Fiction? (Jacob) ["Loch Ness and Literature" http://castra.co.nr] Retrieved October 2007.