In 2022, I will read all of the works of Graham Greene. He was a prolific author, and the list of his works that I will be following includes 41 separate items. Luckily for this project, his books are generally short.

Why do I want to do this?

I have already read five of Greene’s books and I enjoy the style of his writing and the sympathy with which he describes characters who may be quite flawed. His writing style is precise and minimalist, letting the story evolve on its own through mundane and extraordinary events.

I read Travels with My Aunt in high school and enjoyed it, although I’m sure much of it went over my head. I read The Heart of the Matter a little after college and believe it is one of the best English novels I have read. During graduate school I read Stamboul Train. It did not leave much of an impression on me. I read The Human Factor while lounging about in Italy during my honeymoon. The first of his books that I have read that took place primarily in England, it was very bleak and very well written. Last year I read A Burnt-Out Case. I found the story quite simple, but the writing exquisite. I will reread each of these novels this year.

A little about me

I enjoy reading and I read widely and often. For example, as I write this I am currently in the middle of a book on statistics, a book about the beginning of literature in Latin, a Mexican novel, a book about urban policy, and a travel memoir about the country of Georgia. I make reading a significant part of my daily routine.

That said, I only took one literature course in college (as part of a Chinese minor), “Women in Chinese Literature.” I loved the novels we read in the class and found the literary theory irrelevant and boring. I will be considering Graham Greene’s works, then, not with the eye of a literary critic, but rather with the eye of an avid reader of average intelligence and perhaps above average breadth of interests.

A note about the works of Graham Greene

The forty-one works of Graham Greene listed below include much of his published writing and almost all of his published fiction. There are several books of criticism and several children’s books not included in this list. I may add some of those in if the spirit moves me. Or I may not. Of these forty-one works: Twenty-six are novels (including a novella or two), four are travel memoirs, four are collections of short stories, three are autobiographies, two are collections of essays, one is a biography, and one is a collection of plays.

A note about the order

This list is in chronological order with several exceptions. I have placed Greene’s second and third novels, The Name of Action and Rumour at Nightfall, after his second autobiography, Ways of Escape, as that autobiography provides some explanation as to why he repudiated those two novels, never allowing them to be republished. It should also be interesting to read these “juvenilia” after having read some of his greatest works. Three other exceptions to the chronological order are his Collected Essays, Collected Plays and the collection of essays and articles, Reflections.  Each of which includes works published across many years.

The Works of Graham Greene (more or less)

  1. The Man Within (1929)
  2. Stamboul Train (1932) (alternative title: Orient Express)
  3. It’s a Battlefield (1934)
  4. England Made Me (1935) (alternative title: The Shipwrecked)
  5. Journey Without Maps (1936)
  6. A Gun for Sale (1936) (alternative title: This Gun for Hire)
  7. Brighton Rock (1938)
  8. The Lawless Roads (1939) (alternative title: Another Mexico)
  9. The Confidential Agent (1939)
  10. The Power and the Glory (1940) (alternative title: The Labyrinthine Ways)
  11. The Ministry of Fear (1943)
  12. The Heart of the Matter (1948)
  13. The Third Man (1949)la
  14. The End of the Affair (1951)
  15. The Quiet American (1955)
  16. Loser Takes All (1955)
  17. Our Man in Havana (1958)
  18. A Burnt-Out Case (1960)
  19. In Search of a Character: Two African Journals (1961)
  20. Twenty One Stories (1962)
  21. A Sense of Reality (1963)
  22. The Comedians (1966)
  23. May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)
  24. Collected Essays (1969)
  25. Travels with My Aunt (1969)
  26. A Sort of Life (1971)
  27. The Honorary Consul (1973)
  28. Lord Rochester’s Monkey (1974)
  29. The Human Factor (1978)
  30. Ways of Escape (1980)
  31. The Name of Action (1930)
  32. Rumour at Nightfall (1931)
  33. Doctor Fischer of Geneva or The Bomb Party (1980)
  34. Monsignor Quixote (1982)
  35. Getting To Know The General: The Story of an Involvement (1984)
  36. The Tenth Man (1985)
  37. The Collected Plays of Graham Greene (1985)
  38. The Captain and the Enemy (1988)
  39. Reflections (1991)
  40. The Last Word and Other Stories (1991)
  41. A World of My Own: A Dream Diary (1992)