It’s the birthday of Graham Greene (1904-1991), one of the most popular and respected British writers of the 20th century.

Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England, and attended Berkhamsted School, where his father, Canon Charles Henry Greene, was the headmaster; he was bullied there and had a nervous breakdown. His parents sent him to a psychoanalyst with whom he lived while he was being treated. It was then that he began playing Russian roulette with his brother’s revolver, something that became almost a habit. He continued this habit when he went to Balliol College at Oxford: “I was beginning to pull the trigger about as casually as I might take an aspirin tablet.”

At the age of 22, Greene converted to Catholicism through the influence of his future wife, Vivian Dayrell-Browning. He considered it an intellectual conversion in which he came to believe in the probability of God; years later, it became an emotional belief as well. He and Vivian married and had two children (though they separated in the 1960s). Greene worked as a copy editor at The Times from 1926-1930. He was writing all that time, and when his first novel, The Man Within (1929), did well, he quit his job and began working as a movie critic. He wrote a thriller, Stamboul Train (1932; also called Orient Express), one of his novels that he called an “entertainment:” fast-moving and suspenseful but grappling with moral issues. This novel became immensely popular and was made into a movie in 1934. Greene wrote several more popular entertainments, then came out with Brighton Rock (1938), a novel about murder in a British resort town; the novel explores character and moral issues more in-depth than his entertainments and is considered one of his greatest novels. Other important titles include The Power and the Glory (1940; the film version was titled The Fugitive, 1947), about an alcoholic priest on the run in Mexico who nonetheless loves God and tries faithfully to serve; The Heart of the Matter (1948, film in 1953), about a British officer in West Africa who is so compassionate that he commits suicide rather than hurt his wife’s and mistress’s feelings (that’s quite a pickle; I have a suggestion for the officer but I guess it’s too late); and The Quiet American (1956), set in Saigon in the mid 1950s. The Honorary Consul (1973) was his personal favorite though not as brilliantly reviewed; it’s a thriller about a man mistakenly kidnapped by Paraguayan rebels, and the consequence thereof.

So: all in all a prolific, highly successful, critically acclaimed writer with plenty of money. Greene was named a Companion of Honor by Queen Elizabeth II in 1966 and received the Order of Merit in 1986 (these honors are big hairy deals in England). He died of leukemia at 86 in Vevey, Switzerland.

Flannery O’Connor once wrote of Greene, “What he does, I think, is try to make religion respectable to the modern unbeliever by making it seedy. He succeeds so well in making it seedy that then he has to save it by the miracle” (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor).

May you get through this bleak and drippy Tuesday with greater aplomb than might seem feasible and stay scrupulously honest to the data.