Volume 13, Number 1 · July 10, 1969
A Polished Dissenter
By V.S. Pritchett
Collected Essays including The Lost Childhood
by Graham Greene
Viking, 463 pp., $7.95
As a novelist, playwright, and traveler, Graham Greene has something like a neo-romantic's appetite for the disasters and the betrayals of the contemporary world. People and places are sardonically tested for damnation; his ingenious talent has dramatized the old Calvinist thrill. No wonder that the Stevenson of Weir of Hermiston has been one of his masters. No one sees life as exactingly, as indignantly, or as comically as the dissenter; a few have Greene's half-laughing or pitying regard for character. But how many of his now huge audience know him in the very different, sagacious role of the bookish man or as a literary critic and essayist? He has gone through the English mill.
Review, 1496 words
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