The Power and the Glory (ePub)

Graham Greene (1904-1991) is recognized as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full-time to writing with his first big success, Stamboul Train. He became involved in screenwriting and wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays, the most successful being The Third Man. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work, and throughout his life he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour.

“The Power and the Glory’s nameless whisky priest blends seamlessly with his tropical, crooked, anti-clerical Mexico. Roman Catholicism is intrinsic to the character and terrain both; Greene’s imaginative immersion in both is triumphant. . . . The energy and grandeur of [Greene’s] finest novel derive from the will toward compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist. Its unit is the individual, not any class.” —John Updike
 
“Brilliant . . . a splendid achievement.” —The Atlantic Monthly
 
“As brilliantly written as it is magnificently conceived.” —Chicago Sun
 
“[Attracts] not only those who read for diversion and excitement, but those, too, who read for the pleasure of superb writing and shrewd contriving of story.” —Chicago Tribune
 
“A thriller—but also a novel of ideas . . . A work of the highest literary art . . . A book I would have simply died to write.” —Scott Turow, All Things Considered, NPR

Praise for Graham Greene
“The most ingenious, inventive and exciting of our novelists, rich in exactly etched and moving portraits of real human beings . . . A master of storytelling.” —V. S. Pritchett, The Times (London)
 
“In a class by himself . . . The ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety.” —William Golding
 
“A superb storyteller with a gift for provoking controversy.” —The New York Times
 
“Greene had the sharpest eyes for trouble, the finest nose for human weaknesses, and was pitilessly honest in his observations. . . . For experience of a whole century he was the man within.” —Norman Sherry, The Independent
 
“No serious writer of [the twentieth] century has