Graham Greene A Study of the Short Fiction

Ranking among the most widely read English writers of the twentieth century, Graham Greene achieved success with novels like Brighton Rock (1938) and The End of the Affair (1951). Less attention has been devoted to his short stories, however, despite his clear mastery of that art form. In them, Greene treats the same themes--evil, irony, and ambiguity, among others--but with a greater coherence and more striking purity. The extensive travel and other personal experiences that render his novels so captivating also reflect themselves in his short fiction. One of these experiences was his treatment at the hands of bullies while he attended the Berkhamsted School, an ordeal leading Richard Kelly to view the bulk of Greene's writings as an attempt to work out the trauma of this boyhood abuse. To support his position, Kelly goes back to the uncollected stories Greene wrote as a schoolboy and then as a student at Oxford. Kelly uses these tales as a stepping stone to a thorough examination of the later short fiction, from The Basement Room (1935) to The Last Word (1990). Those readers already familiar with Greene will find Kelly's insightful links between the stories and the novels very enlightening, and novices will be able to discuss and reread Greene's works with a much greater sense of command. This, the first book-length study of Graham Greene's short fiction, will prove indispensable to anyone interested in the writer.