By Jessica Schneider Dec 16, 2008, 12:24 GMT
This new collection of letters, by Richard Greene, is what the NYT describes as:
“tens of thousands of his letters have been pared down to a tidy 400 or so by Richard Greene (not related), an associate professor at the University of Toronto. As good as these letters can be — Graham Greene is, by turns, fond, cranky, depressive, mischievous,” the article states.
The reviewer also notes: “Like the best books of literary letters, this volume reads like brisk, epistolary biography. We follow Greene from when he leaves home (he grew up near London, the son of a public-school headmaster) to attend Balliol College, Oxford, where he read history. We watch him woo and wed Vivienne Dayrell-Browning, and try to settle into family life and a writing career.”
Publishers Weekly states: “In love and through several intense and long-lasting affairs, Greene remains something of a tortured exhibitionist. His writing career led to correspondence with a range of authors and personalities, including Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Kurt Vonnegut, Ralph Richardson, Michael Korda, Anthony Burgess, the future Pope Paul VI and radical Swiss theologian Hans Küng. Points of travel famously include such hot spots as Vietnam, Sierra Leone, Haiti, Cuba and Israel. In all, this well-thought-out collection newly reveals a remarkable activist-writer.”
Click here for the NYT review. 8 pages of illus. W.W. Norton & Co, 480 pages. The
NYT article also provides an excerpt.
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