Graham Greene (1904-1991), whose long life nearly spanned
the length of the twentieth century, was one of its greatest
novelists. Educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College,
Oxford, he started his career as a sub-editor of The Times of
London. He began to attract notice as a novelist with his fourth
book, Orient Express, in 1932. In 1935, he trekked across northern
Liberia, his first experience in Africa, recounted in A Journey
Without Maps (1936). He converted to Catholicism in 1926, an
edifying decision, and reported on religious persecution in Mexico
in 1938 in The Lawless Roads, which served as a background for his
famous The Power and the Glory, one of several “Catholic” novels
(Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair).
During the war he worked for the British secret service in Sierra
Leone; afterward, he began wide-ranging travels as a journalist,
which were reflected in novels such as The Quiet American, Our Man
in Havana, The Comedians, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary
Consul, The Human Factor, Monsignor Quixote, and The Captain and
the Enemy. In addition to his many novels, Graham Greene wrote
several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays,
two books of autobiography—A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape—two
biographies, and four books for children. He also contributed
hundreds of essays and film and book reviews to The Spectator and
other journals, many of which appear in the late collection
Reflections. Most of his novels have been filmed, including The
Third Man, which the author first wrote as a film treatment. Graham
Greene was named Companion of Honour and received the Order of
Merit among numerous other awards.
Born in Cape Town, South Africa, on February 9, 1940, John
Michael Coetzee studied first at Cape Town and later at
the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a Ph.D. degree
in literature. In 1972 he returned to South Africa and joined the
faculty of the University of Cape Town. His works of fiction
include Dusklands, Waiting for the Barbarians, which won
South Africa’s highest literary honor, the Central News Agency
Literary Award, and the Life and Times of Michael K., for
which Coetzee was awarded his first Booker Prize in 1983. He has
also published a memoir, Boyhood: Scenes From a Provincial
Life, and several essays collections. He has won many other
literary prizes including the Lannan Award for Fiction, the
Jerusalem Prize and The Irish Times International Fiction
Prize. In 1999 he again won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize
for Disgrace, becoming the first author to win the award twice
in its 31-year history. In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel
Prize in Literature.
“Here the probing is carried further in a brilliant and
uncompromising indictment of some of the worst aspects of modern
civilization, showing us the hard-boiled criminal mind not as a
return to savagery but as a horrible perversion of
cerebration.”—The New York Times
“Why does this bleak, seething and anarchic novel still resonate?
Its energy and power is that of the rebellious adolescent,
foreshadowing the rise of the cult of youth in the latter part of
the 20th century.”—The Guardian
“[Greene] believed his coldness vital for his art - 'There is,' he
affirmed, 'a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer'.”—John Carey
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