After leaving Oxford, Greene worked as a private tutor and then turned to journalism; first on the
Nottingham Journal, Although Greene objected to being described as a
Roman 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
Brighton Rock,
The Power and the Glory,
The Heart of the Matter, and
The End of the Affair, which have been named "the gold standard" of the Catholic novel. Several works, such as
The Confidential Agent,
The Quiet American,
Our Man in Havana,
The Human Factor, and his screenplay for
The Third Man, also show Greene's avid interest in the workings and intrigues of international politics and espionage. In the early 1930s Greene moved to the left politically. He read left-wing writers like
G.D.H. Cole and
John Strachey; in 1933 he joined the
Independent Labour Party. This move to the left is reflected in the characters and plot of his fifth novel
''It's A Battlefield''. His later political affiliations and convictions were more ambiguous. He supplemented his novelist's income with freelance journalism, book and film reviews for
The Spectator, and co-editing the magazine
Night and Day. Greene's 1937 film review of
Wee Willie Winkie, for
Night and Day—which said that the nine-year-old star,
Shirley Temple, displayed "a dubious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen"—provoked Twentieth Century Fox successfully to sue for £3,500 plus costs, and Greene left the UK to live in Mexico until after the trial was over. While in Mexico, Greene developed the ideas for the novel often considered his masterpiece,
The Power and the Glory. Greene also wrote short stories and plays, His writing influences included
Henry James,
Robert Louis Stevenson,
H. Rider Haggard,
Joseph Conrad,
Ford Madox Ford,
Marcel Proust,
Charles Péguy and
John Buchan.
Travel and espionage Part of Greene's reputation as a novelist is for weaving the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels. Greene himself responded to commentators who called the world of his fiction an imaginary place: Throughout his life, Greene travelled to what he called the world's wild and remote places. In 1941, the travels led to his being recruited into
MI6 by his sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the agency. Accordingly, he was posted to Sierra Leone during the Second World War.
Kim Philby, who was later found to be a
Soviet agent, was Greene's supervisor and friend at MI6. Greene resigned from MI6 in 1944. Greene also corresponded with intelligence officer and spy
John Cairncross for forty years; the correspondence is held by the John J. Burns Library, at
Boston College. Greene first left Europe at 30 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 for by the publishing company
Longman, thanks to his friendship with
Tom Burns. That voyage produced two books, the non-fiction
The Lawless Roads (published as
Another Mexico in the US) and the novel
The Power and the Glory. In 1953, the
Holy Office informed Greene that
The Power and the Glory was damaging to the reputation of the priesthood; but later, in a private audience with Greene,
Pope Paul VI told him that, although parts of his novels would offend some Catholics, he should ignore the criticism. In 1950 his brother Hugh Carleton Greene, who was head of UK Information Services in
Malaya, brought Greene to Malaya during the early phase of the
Malayan Emergency. Greene returned to England via Indo-China in 1951 to visit his friend Trevor Wilson, British consul in Hanoi. There he met General
Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, French high commissioner and commander-in-chief of the French Expeditionary Corps. Greene returned several times and wrote newspaper articles and developed the book,
The Quiet American. In 1954, Greene travelled to
Haiti. He returned in 1956. In 1957
François Duvalier, known as "Papa Doc", was elected president over
Louis Déjoie. Greene returned to Haiti in 1963 staying at the
Hotel Oloffson in
Port-au-Prince, where
The Comedians (1966) is set. His 1963 article in the
Sunday Telegraph, "Nightmare Republic," was a first-hand account of Duvalier's dictatorship in which Greene depicted Haiti as a place of profound terror and paranoia, where the regime's brutal militia, the
Tontons Macoutes, engaged in widespread torture, extortion, and violence against the population. As inspiration for his novel
A Burnt-Out Case (1960), Greene spent time travelling around Africa visiting a number of
leper colonies in the
Congo Basin and in what were then the
British Cameroons. During this trip in late February and early March 1959, Greene met several times with
Andrée de Jongh, a leader in the Belgian resistance during WWII, who famously established an escape route to Gibraltar through the Pyrenees for downed allied airmen. In 1957, just months after
Fidel Castro began his final revolutionary assault on the
Batista regime in Cuba, Greene played a small role in helping the revolutionaries, as a secret courier transporting warm clothing for Castro's rebels hiding in the hills during the Cuban winter. Greene's friendship with Castro, and with undemocratic Latin American leaders such as
Daniel Ortega and
Omar Torrijos, led some commentators to question his commitment to democracy. He used his influence to stop the firm putting his own novels forward for the
Booker Prize, which he felt should go to younger writers, and to champion
Richard Power, whose
The Hungry Grass he persuaded Bodley to nominate for a posthumous Booker. == Personal life ==