William golding (1911-1993)

English novelist who in 1983 won the Nobel Prize for Literature for his parables of the human condition. He attracted a cult of followers, especially among the youth of the post-World War II generation.

Educated at Marlborough Grammar School, where his father taught, and at Brasenose College, Oxford, Golding graduated in 1935. After working in a settlement house and in small theatre companies, he became a schoolmaster at Bishop Wordsworth's School, Salisbury. He joined the Royal Navy in 1940, took part in the action that saw the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck, and commanded a rocket-launching craft during the invasion of France in 1944. After the war he resumed teaching at Bishop Wordsworth's until 1961.

Golding's often allegoricalfictionmakes broad use of allusions toclassical literature,mythology, andChristiansymbolism. No distinct thread unites his novels, and the subject matter and technique vary. Golding's first published novel was Lord of the Flies (1954; film 1963 and 1990), the story of a group of schoolboys isolated on a coral island who revert to savagery. Thus the novel dealt with an unsuccessful struggle against barbarism and war, thus showing the ambiguity and fragility of civilization. Its imaginative and brutal depiction of the rapid and inevitable dissolution of social mores aroused widespread interest. The Inheritors (1955), set in the last days of Neanderthal man, is another story of the essential violence and depravity of human nature. The inheritors looked back into prehis­tory, advancing the thesis that humankind's evolutionary ancestors, "the new people," (generally identified with homo sapiens) triumphed over a gentler race (generally identified with Neanderthals) as much by violence and deceit as by natural superiority. The guilt-filled reflections of a naval officer, his ship torpedoed, who faces an agonizing death are the subject of Pincher Martin (1956). Two other novels, Free Fall (1959) and The Spire (1964), also demonstrate Golding's belief that "man produces evil as a bee produces honey." Darkness Visible (1979) tells the story of a boy horribly burned in the London blitz during World War II. His later works include Rites of Passage (1980), which won the Booker McConnell Prize, and its sequels, Close Quarters (1987) and Fire Down Below (1989). Golding was knighted in 1988.

Henry graham greene (1904-1991)

English novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and journalist whose novels treat life's moral ambiguities in the context of contemporary political settings.

His first published work was a book of verse, Babbling April (1925), and upon the modest success of his first novel, The Man Within (1929), he quit The Times and worked as a film critic and literary editor for The Spectator until 1940. He then traveled widely for much of the next three decades as a freelance journalist, searching out locations for his novels in the process.

Greene's first three novels are held to be of small account. He began to come into his own with a thriller, Stamboul Train (1932; also entitled Orient Express), which plays off various characters against each other as they ride a train from the English Channel to Istanbul. This was the first of a string of novels that he termed "enter­tainments," works similar to thrillers in their spare, tough language and their suspenseful, swiftly moving plots, but possessing greater moral complexity and depth. Stamboul Train was also the first of Greene's many novels to be filmed (1934). It was followed by three more entertainments that were equally popular with the reading public: A Gun for Sale (1936; also entitled This Gun For Hire; filmed 1942), The Confidential Agent (1939; filmed 1945), and The Ministry of Fear (1943; filmed 1945). A fifth entertainment, The Third Man, which was published in novel form in 1949, was originally a screenplay for a classic film directed by Carol Reed.

One of Greene's finest novels, Brighton Rock (1938; filmed 1948), shares some elements with his entertainments – the protagonist is a hunted criminal roaming the underworld of an English sea resort – but explores the contrasting moral attitudes of its main characters with a new degree of intensity and emotional involvement. In this book, Greene contrasts a cheerful and warm-hearted humanist he obviously dislikes with a corrupt and violent teenage criminal whose tragic situation is intensified by a Roman Catholic upbringing. Greene's finest novel, The Power and the Glory (1940; filmed 1962), has a more directly Catholic theme: the desperate wanderings of a priest who is hunted down in rural Mexico at a time when the church is outlawed there. The weak and alcoholic priest tries to fulfill his priestly duties despite the constant threat of death at the hands of a revolutionary government.

Greene worked for the Foreign Office during World War II and was stationed for a while at Freetown, Sierra Leone, the scene of another of his best-known novels, The Heart of the Matter (1948). This book traces the decline of a kind-hearted British colonial officer whose pity for his wife and mistress eventually leads him to commit suicide. The End of the Affair (1951) is narrated by an agnostic in love with a woman who forsakes him because of a religious conviction that brings her near to sainthood.

Greene's next four novels were each set in a different Third World nation on the brink of political upheaval. The protagonist of A Burnt-Out Case (1961) is a Roman Catholic architect tired of adulation who meets a tragic end in the Belgian Congo shortly before that colony reaches independence. The Quiet American (1956) chronicles the doings of a well-intentioned American government agent in Vietnam in the midst of the anti-French uprising there in the early 1950s. Our Man in Havana (1958; filmed 1959) is set in Cuba just before the communist revolution there, while The Comedians (1966) is set in Haiti during the rule of François Duvalier. Greene's last four novels, The Honorary Consul (1973), The Human Factor (1978; filmed 1979), Monsignor Quixote (1982), and The Tenth Man (1985), represent a decline from the level of his best fiction.

The world Greene's characters inhabit is a fallen one, and the tone of his works emphasizes the presence of evil as a palpable force. His novels display a consistent preoccupation with sin and moral failure acted out in seedy locales characterized by danger, violence, and phy­sical decay. Greene's chief concern is the moral and spiritual struggles within individuals, but the larger political and social settings of his novels give such conflicts an enhanced resonance. His early novels depict a shabby Depression-stricken Europe sliding toward fascism and war, while many of his subsequent novels are set in remote locales undergoing wars, revolutions, or other political upheavals.

Despite the downbeat tone of much of his subject matter, Greene was in fact one of the most widely read British novelists of the 20th century. His books' unusual popularity is due partly to his production of thrillers featuring crime and intrigue but more importantly to his superb gifts as a storyteller, especially his masterful selection of detail and his use of realistic dialogue in a fast-paced narrative.

Greene published several collections of short stories, among them Nine­teen Stories (1947; revised as Twenty-One Stories, 1954). Among his plays are The Living Room (performed 1952) and The Potting Shed (1957). His Collected Essays appeared in 1969. A Sort of Life (1971) is a memoir to 1931, to which Ways of Escape (1980) is a sequel.