Notes For October 10th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 10th, 1930, the legendary English playwright and screenwriter Harold Pinter was born in Hackney, East London, England. At the age of ten, Pinter found himself caught up in the terror and chaos of the Blitz. It affected him deeply as both a human being and as a writer.

When he wasn't caught up in the war, Pinter attended Hackney Downs School, a grammar school in London, where he discovered his talents for writing and acting. He wrote for the school magazine and played Macbeth and Romeo in school productions of the Shakespeare plays.

Pinter excelled in athletics as well. He was an avid cricket player and runner. As a runner, he broke his school's sprinting record, but his passion was cricket. He would serve as chairman of the Gaieties Cricket Club.

In 1948, at the age of eighteen, Pinter began studying drama at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. A year later, he was drafted for military service but declared himself a conscientious objector.

He did this not because he was a pacifist, but because he loathed the Cold War and believed that the governments of England and the United States were just as corrupt and immoral as the Soviet Union. After being tried twice as a draft evader, he was given a fine.

Disliking the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, Pinter transferred to the Central School of Speech and Drama. By 1951, he had joined the Anew McMaster repertory company and begun his career as an actor.

a For the next five years, taking the stage name David Baron, Pinter played over twenty roles in the company's productions. To supplement his income, he worked at various jobs including that of a waiter, a postman, and a pub bouncer.

Though he was making a name for himself as an actor, Harold Pinter's real ambition was to be a writer. The actor Henry Woolf, a close childhood friend, encouraged Pinter to write his first play and then starred in it - as part of his postgraduate work.

The play, The Room (1957), caught the attention of a young producer named Michael Codron, who would stage a production of Pinter's next play, a breakout work that made Pinter's name as a playwright.

In The Birthday Party (1958), a surreal dark comedy, Stanley Webber, a disheveled piano player in his late thirties, lives in a seaside boarding house run by Meg and Petey, a couple in their sixties.

Meg exhibits strange affection for Stanley; sometimes she flirts with him, sometimes she acts like his mother. One morning, Meg wishes Stanley a happy birthday and gives him a present - a toy drum.

Stanley tries to convince her that it's not his birthday, but she won't listen. She has planned a party which includes some unusual guests - McCann and Goldberg, two strangers to Stanley who may be dangerously psychotic - or maybe it's Stanley who's mad...

Although it's now considered Pinter's first masterwork, The Birthday Party was trashed by most critics when it debuted in 1958. The famous drama critic Irving Wardle gave it a glowing review in which he called it a "comedy of menace." Unfortunately, the review was published just after the play closed.

Undaunted, Harold Pinter kept writing. His next play, The Dumb Waiter (1959), opened in Germany before it hit the London stage. It was a two character play. The characters are Ben and Gus, two hit men waiting in a basement room to receive their orders for their next hit.

While they wait, Ben and Gus make tea and engage in conversations where they argue semantics and discuss the stories in the paper that Ben is reading. Meanwhile, in the background, the dumb waiter in the room occasionally - and strangely - opens to deliver food orders.

Ben tries to explain via the dumb waiter's speaking tube that the orders were sent to the wrong room. At the play's climax, the speaking tube whistles and Ben answers it while Gus is getting a drink of water in the bathroom. It's their orders for their next hit. The play ends with Ben drawing his gun on the target - Gus.

Harold Pinter would write nearly thirty plays and fifteen sketches. Between 1968 and 1982, he wrote a series of "memory plays" that explored the nature of memory - its vagaries, ambiguities, and mysteries.

Pinter also wrote 27 screenplays, adapting his plays and the works of others for the screen. He won an Academy Award for his 1981 screenplay adaptation of John Fowles' novel, The French Lieutenant's Woman.

In October of 2005, Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The award outraged right wingers around the world. A prominent liberal political activist, Pinter railed against the Cold War arms race, nuclear weapons, the blockade of Cuba, the South African apartheid regime, the Gulf War, and the later wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He believed that the George W. Bush administration "was charging towards world domination while the American public and Britain's mass-murdering prime minister sat back and watched." Pinter described the war in Iraq as "a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the conception of international law."

The most controversial aspect of Pinter's political activism was his strong rebuke of the Israeli government for its persecution of the Palestinian people. Though Jewish himself, he expressed his contempt for the murderous Israeli apartheid regime, signing the mission statement of the activist group Jews for Justice for Palestinians.

Harold Pinter was also awarded the French Légion d'honneur. He died of liver cancer in 2008 at 78.

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Quote Of The Day

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"Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living."

- Harold Pinter

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features Harold Pinter giving his Nobel lecture. Enjoy!

Notes For October 9th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 9th, 1849, Annabel Lee, the classic final poem by the legendary American writer Edgar Allan Poe, was published. It was published posthumously by the New York Daily Tribune, just two days after his death.

Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston in January of 1809, would become most famous as a master of the short story and the author of classic Gothic horror tales such as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Black Cat, and The Fall of the House of Usher.

However, he began his literary career as a poet, wrote poetry prolifically, and became famous for classic poems such as The Conqueror Worm and The Raven. His last great poem was Annabel Lee.

Written in May of 1849 as Poe's life was falling apart and his health rapidly deteriorating, Annabel Lee was an ode to his great love, his young wife Virginia, who had succumbed to tuberculosis two years earlier at only 24.

Virginia, a cousin of Poe's, was thirteen when they first married, though they wouldn't share a bed until she was sixteen. They adored each other. Virginia often sat close to Poe while he wrote. She maintained his pens and prepared his manuscripts for mailing.

In a letter to a friend, Poe wrote of his Virginia, "I see no one among the living as beautiful as my little wife." When she contracted tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of nineteen, Poe was devastated.

Virginia turned to her husband for the strength to fight her illness. A year before her death, she wrote this poem:

Ever with thee I wish to roam —
Dearest my life is thine.
Give me a cottage for my home
And a rich old cypress vine,
Removed from the world with its sin and care
And the tattling of many tongues.
Love alone shall guide us when we are there —
Love shall heal my weakened lungs;
And Oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,
Never wishing that others may see!
Perfect ease we'll enjoy, without thinking to lend
Ourselves to the world and its glee —
Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

Unfortunately, as Virginia's illness grew worse, Poe fell back into the alcoholism that had nearly destroyed him in the past. Her death devastated the man who had loved her so dearly.

A friend remarked:

The loss of his wife was a sad blow to [Poe.] He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all."

Drowning in his grief for Virginia, Poe visited her grave often and drank heavily. The more he drank, the worse his mental state became. He tried in vain to move on, knowing that he really couldn't live without her.

He dated poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement was called off as a result of Poe's drinking, his mental instability, and the interference of Sarah's mother, who did all she could to sabotage the relationship.

Poe returned to Richmond and resumed his relationship with his childhood sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster. He later returned to Baltimore, where he plunged into a quagmire of severe alcoholism and mental illness. He fell into financial ruin and disappeared.

Before his disappearance, Poe gave a manuscript to a friend of his. It was something he'd written a while back, a poem he described as a "little trifle that may be worth something to you." It was his completed manuscript of Annabel Lee.

On October 3rd, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found wandering the streets of Baltimore by a man named Joseph W. Walker. Severely ill, incoherent, and wearing someone else's clothes, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital. He died four days later at the age of 40.

Poe's death certificate and medical records were lost in a fire, so the actual cause of his death remains a mystery. Newspapers reported that he died of "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation."

These were common euphemisms used when a person died of illicit causes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, or venereal disease. They were also used when the authorities wanted to keep the real cause of death quiet.

Some scholars and biographers have suggested that Poe may have been murdered for political reasons or may have contracted rabies, syphilis, meningitis, or another illness. Others theorize that he just drank himself to death out of grief, which, sadly, is the most likely case.

It has been theorized that Poe was a victim of cooping, a form of electoral fraud common in the 19th century. Cooping gangs would kidnap citizens off the street, ply them with alcohol, beat them, and force them to vote for a particular candidate (multiple times, using fake papers and disguises) under the threat of more violence or death.

Rufus Griswold, an enemy of Poe's who had published his work in the past, somehow became his literary executor. He wrote a biography of Poe called Memoir of the Author, where he described the writer as a depraved madman addled by drink and drugs.

Most of Griswold's claims were either outright lies or half-truths. For example, although Poe was an opium user and wrote about it, he was only a casual user and never became addicted to the drug.

Griswold's biography was virulently denounced by those who knew Edgar Allan Poe. The letters that Griswold presented as proof of his claims were later revealed to be forgeries.

Over a hundred years after Poe's death, his classic poem Annabel Lee would inspire the legendary Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov to write his classic novel, Lolita (1955).

The novel opens with protagonist and narrator Humbert Humbert recalling his great childhood love Annabel Leigh, (named after Poe's Annabel Lee) her sudden death from typhus, and the grief that would lead him down a path of self-destruction, ending in his death.

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Quote Of The Day

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"The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

- Edgar Allan Poe

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem, Annabel Lee. Enjoy!

Notes For October 8th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 8th, 1943, the famous American writer R.L. Stine was born. He was born Robert Lawrence Stine in Columbus, Ohio. The oldest of three children, Stine's father was a shipping clerk, his mother a homemaker.

When he was nine years old, Stine found a typewriter in his attic. He began writing with it immediately, typing up everything from short stories to joke books. After graduating from Ohio State University in 1965, Stine moved to New York City to become a writer.

In 1969, he married his girlfriend Jane Waldhorn, a writer and editor who would found the children's book publishing company Parachute Press. In 1980, the Stines had their first and only child, a son named Matthew.

As a writer, R.L. Stine got his start writing joke books for children. He wrote dozens of joke books, publishing them under the pseudonym Jovial Bob Stine. He created the teen humor magazine Bananas and worked for years with the children's cable TV channel Nickelodeon. He would later switch genres from humor to horror.

In 1987, Stine published his first teen horror novel, Blind Date. He would follow it with Twisted, Beach Party, The Boyfriend, The Baby-sitter, Beach House, Hit And Run, The Girlfriend, and other titles, most of which were published as part of a series - the Point Horror series.

Around this time, he also co-created and served as head writer for the Nickelodeon children's TV series Eureeka's Castle, which ran from 1989-1995.

In 1990, Stine, with his wife's company Parachute Press, began publishing a new series of teen horror novels called the Fear Street series, set in the fictional East Coast town of Shadyland. Fear Street is a street in the town that had been named after a cursed family.

In the books, a group of average teenagers find themselves pitted against malicious, often supernatural adversaries, though sometimes the kids get caught up in non-supernatural horror dramas like murder mysteries.

Although the Fear Street novels are geared toward teen readers, they often featured violence and gore on a par with adult horror novels.

Tom Perrotta, the bestselling novelist known for such memorable works as Election (1998) and Little Children (2004), revealed in a 2007 interview that he had ghostwritten one of R.L. Stine's Fear Street novels, The Thrill Club.

In 1992, two years after his Fear Street teen horror series took off, Stine and Parachute Press decided to produce a series of horror novels geared toward preteen readers. It would prove to be his most successful series of books.

It would become a pop culture phenomenon that made R.L. Stine a household name and earned him a place on the Forbes List of the 40 Best Paid Entertainers of 1996-1997, as his income that fiscal year was $41,000,000.

The series of books was called Goosebumps. Stine cranked out dozens of them. The typical Goosebumps book was a paperback novella of approximately 120 pages long. The first title was Welcome To Dead House.

In it, 12-year-old Amanda and her younger brother Josh move into a house that their father inherited from his great uncle. The siblings soon discover that their new home, located in the town of Dark Falls, is cursed.

Every child who ever lived in the home was murdered; now it's haunted by the living dead children, who need to consume new blood from a freshly killed victim every year to preserve their immortal existence. So they tricked Amanda and Josh's father into moving there.

Though not as gruesome as Stine's Fear Street series, the Goosebumps books were just as scary. Some parents complained that they were too scary for their preteen readers. Nevertheless, the series became a monster hit with kids - no pun intended.

Translated into 32 languages, the Goosebumps series has sold over 300,000,000 copies worldwide. Frightening, clever, well written, and often containing surprise twist endings, the Goosebumps books also had many adult fans, myself included.

R.L. Stine won numerous awards for his Goosebumps books, which were adapted as a TV series that ran from 1995-1998. When the series debuted on CBBC in the UK, due to the government's strict censorship guidelines for children's programming, many episodes were banned or heavily cut.

However, on the cable channel Jetix, available in England and Ireland, the episodes aired with few or no cuts. In the U.S., in addition to the TV series, there were direct-to-video releases of Goosebumps shows on VHS and DVD.

A Goosebumps feature film was released in 2015 for the Halloween season, starring Jack Black as R.L. Stine. In it, the horrors from the reclusive writer's books come to life and threaten the Maryland town where he lives.

The movie did poorly on its opening weekend, grossing only $23 million on an estimated $53 million budget, but the total domestic gross for its theatrical run was $80 million, with a worldwide total gross of $158 million.

So, a sequel, Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, was released three years later. Its opening weekend was worse than the previous film's, grossing only about $15 million on a lower budget of $35 million. The total worldwide gross was $93 million.

In Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween, some kids find an old manuscript while cleaning out an abandoned house. They recite an incantation in it, unknowingly resurrecting Slappy the Dummy, a demonic ventriloquist's dummy.

In 1995, after writing numerous children's books, Stine published Superstitious, his first horror novel geared toward adult readers. Unfortunately, the book was poorly received and became a critical and commercial failure.

Stine has since written other adult oriented novels, such as The Sitter and Eye Candy, but they too poved nowhere near as successful as Stine's children's horror novels.

He has published other horror series for kids, including Ghosts Of Fear Street (a younger version of the Fear Street series geared toward preteens) and The Nightmare Room. He also published a non-horror series called the Rotten School books, which featured the comic misadventures of a group of kids at boarding school.

R.L. Stine's most recent horror series for children is the Goosebumps SlappyWorld books, launched in 2017 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the original series, narrated by / and or featuring Slappy the Dummy, the most famous villain of the original Goosebumps series.

A new Goosebumps TV series was produced by the Disney+ / Hulu streaming service that ran from 2023-2025. Unrelated to the previous movies, it was about a group of high school students who accidentally unleash supernatural forces on their town and must work together to stop the evil.

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Quote Of The Day

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"I'm really a writing machine. I have no rituals. I don't need a special desk or special background music. As long as I have a keyboard in front of me, I can write."

- R.L. Stine

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of R.L. Stine's first Goosebumps novel, Welcome To Dead House.

Notes For October 7th, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 7th, 1955, the legendary American poet Allen Ginsberg gave his first public reading of Howl, the epic poem that would become a classic anthem of the Beat Generation and make him world famous.

Ginsberg read his poem at The Six Gallery Reading, an event organized by poet Kenneth Rexroth and promoted by Ginsberg that brought together the Beat literati's East and West Coast factions.

The Six Gallery in San Francisco was a former auto repair shop that had been turned into an art gallery. After Rexroth introduced Ginsberg to poet Gary Snyder, the two men planned the Six Gallery Reading and sent out postcard invitations to the event.

Rexroth, Ginsberg, and Snyder were all scheduled to read, along with Philip Whalen, Philip Lemantia, and Michael McClure. Ginsberg introduced the group to Jack Kerouac, who would depict the reading in his classic novel, The Dharma Bums (1958).

Over a hundred people attended the Six Gallery Reading. They were asked to chip in for drinks, and after the collection was taken up, Jack Kerouac went out and bought four gallon jugs of wine which were passed around while the poets read.

Ginsberg was next to last to read. He went on around 11PM. Nervous at first, having never given a public poetry reading before, he began reading in a quiet voice. Then he got into the groove and found his rhythm, reading each line in one breath. Jack Kerouac chanted "Go! Go! Go!" as Ginsberg read, and the crowd went crazy.

The Six Gallery Reading got a ton of publicity. Everyone was talking about the amazing new poet named Allen Ginsberg and his incredible epic poem. An overnight sensation, he became a celebrity.

Howl, dedicated to Ginsberg's friend and fellow writer Carl Solomon, (whom he'd met when they were both patients in a mental hospital) was a revolution in American poetic voice, and these gutwrenching opening lines would be forever imprinted in the American consciousness:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the
starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

Michael McClure wrote of Ginsberg's reading of Howl:

Ginsberg read on to the end of the poem, which left us standing in wonder, or cheering and wondering, but knowing at the deepest level that a barrier had been broken, that a human voice and body had been hurled against the harsh wall of America...

In 1956, Ginsberg's poem was published in book form as Howl and Other Poems - one of the most celebrated and controversial poetry collections of its time. It contained language and sexual imagery more daring than in the works of most other poets. 

The following year, U.S. Customs officials seized over 500 copies of Howl and Other Poems that had been sent from its original publisher in London. The collection was declared legally obscene and officially banned in the U.S.

So, when legendary poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti defied the ban, publishing the book himself and selling it at his famous San Francisco bookshop, the City Lights Bookstore, he was arrested on charges of obscenity.

The censorship of Ginsberg's book became a cause celibre among defenders of the First Amendment and the ban was overturned by presiding Judge Clayton Horn.

The judge found that Howl and Other Poems was not legally obscene because it possessed redeeming artistic value. Ferlinghetti's lead defense attorney, Jake Ehrlich, wrote a book about the case called Howl of the Censor.

Ginsberg's writing career took off, and his public readings always drew standing-room-only crowds. He would become one of the greatest and most influential American poets since Walt Whitman.

In 2010, Howl, an acclaimed feature film about the poetry collection's censorship battle, was released. It starred James Franco as Allen Ginsberg and Andrew Rogers as Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

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Quote Of The Day

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“One does not know yet whether Christ was God or the Devil - Buddha is more reassuring.”

- Allen Ginsberg

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete live recording of Allen Ginsberg reading his classic poem, Howl. Enjoy!

IWW Members' Publishing Successes For The Week Ending 10/5/25

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Chandrika Radhakrishnan

I'm happy that my microfiction piece, The Letter, found a place in Issue 50 of Fairfield Scribes. The wins are far in between, yet give me hope that editors will sit up and notice how brilliant I am! Now, I sound like someone :)

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Notes For October 3rd, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 3rd, 1895, The Red Badge of Courage, the classic novel by the famous American writer Stephen Crane, was published in book form. Like most novels of the time, it first appeared in a serialized format, published by a newspaper.

The book version differed greatly from Crane's original serialized manuscript, as its publisher feared that its subject matter - how the horrors of war can bring out both the best and the worst of soldiers in battle - would prove too controversial. The manuscript was heavily edited.

Crane was no stranger to controversy; his first novel, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) was a critical and commercial failure due to its controversial story of a Bowery girl driven to poverty, prostitution, and despair after her violent alcoholic mother kicks her out.

The author hadn't deliberately intended to offend his readers, he just believed in literary realism, which was being employed by his contemporaries, such as the legendary French writer Emile Zola.

After reading accounts of famous Civil War battles in magazine articles, Crane was appalled by the dry writing, which he found to be "as emotionless as rocks." What was it really like to be a soldier in battle, facing the horrific carnage of the Civil War?

He had the idea for his next novel and immediately began work on the manuscript. He completed it in April of 1894. The original title was Private Fleming / His Various Battles. It would later be changed to The Red Badge of Courage.

Henry Fleming is an 18-year-old private in the Union Army. Carried away by the romance of war and glory, he joined the Army over his mother's objections. The novel opens with Henry's regiment, the 304th New York Regiment, awaiting battle by a river one cold day.

As he anxiously waits for the battle to begin, Henry wonders if he'll be brave when the time comes or turn tail and run. His hometown friend and fellow soldier, Jim Conklin, admits that he'd run if the other men did. Suddenly, the battle begins as the Confederates charge.

Henry's regiment initially drives the enemy back, but the Confederates regroup quickly and attack again. Some of the Union soldiers are forced to flee. Fearing that the battle is lost, Henry deserts his regiment and escapes into a nearby forest - but not before hearing a Union general declare victory.

Ashamed of his cowardice, Henry wanders through the woods and comes upon an eerie sight - a decomposing corpse in a quiet clearing. Frightened, he flees the forest and happens upon some injured soldiers returning from the battle - one is Jim Conklin, delirious from blood loss.

Jim angrily refuses Henry's help and dies. Henry crosses paths with a group of retreating soldiers and is accidentally struck on the head by a gun butt. Tired, hungry, and thirsty, Henry decides to return to his regiment regardless of his shame.

At camp, his comrades, believing that his wound was the result of a bullet graze, take care of him. Nobody witnessed Henry's desertion; he's in the clear. He still feels ashamed. The next morning, his regiment goes into battle against a smaller group of Confederates, and he proves himself a good soldier.

In the final battle between his regiment and the Confederates, Henry acts as a flag bearer to replace the fallen color sergeant. A Confederate regiment, hidden behind a distant fence, attacks. The Union soldiers, having no cover, are sitting ducks.

The regiment faces an agonizing choice: death if they stay or disgrace if they retreat. The officers order a charge. Though as a flag bearer, he's unarmed, Henry bravely leads the other men in the charge. He escapes injury and the Confederates are defeated.

The novel concludes on this haunting, impressionistic note:

It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover's thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks — an existence of soft and eternal peace.

Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.

The Red Badge of Courage, with its modern, realistic style and nontraditional plot, became an overnight sensation, receiving ten print runs in its first year. Most critics raved about it, but a few condemned it as "a vicious satire upon American soldiers and American armies."

The novel would be adapted as a feature film a few times. The first and most famous adaptation was released in 1951. Directed by legendary filmmaker John Huston, it starred real life war hero turned actor Audie Murphy as Henry Fleming.

Though he tragically died young of tuberculosis at the age of 28, during his short lifetime, the prolific Stephen Crane published five novels, five short story collections, and two poetry collections. Other works were published posthumously.

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Quote Of The Day

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"A man with a full stomach and the respect of his fellows had no business to scold about anything that he might think to be wrong in the ways of the universe, or even with the ways of society. Let the unfortunates rail; the others may play marbles."

- Stephen Crane

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of Stephen Crane's classic novel, The Red Badge of Courage. Enjoy!

Notes For October 2nd, 2025

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This Day In Literary History

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On October 2nd, 1904, the famous English writer Graham Greene was born. He was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England. The fourth of six children, his younger brother Hugh was Director-General of the BBC.

Greene's father, Charles, was Second Master at Berkhamsted School. In 1910, when Graham was six years old, his father became the new Headmaster, and Graham attended the school. He hated it.

Bullied by his classmates and severely depressed, Graham attempted suicide several times. At 16, he was sent to London for six months of psychoanalysis, after which, he returned to Berkhamsted. Later, in 1925, while attending Balliol College, Oxford, his first book was published.

It was a collection of poetry called Babbling April. It was poorly received, so after graduating with a second-class degree in history, Greene became a journalist, first for the Nottingham Journal, then as a sub-editor for The Times.

While in Nottingham, Greene began a correspondence with Vivien Dayrell-Browning, a Catholic convert who had written him to correct a point on Catholic doctrine in one of his articles.

The relationship led Greene to convert to Catholicism in 1926. He married Vivien a year later, and she bore him two children. The couple would separate in 1948, yet remain married although Greene had numerous affairs.

Graham Greene's first novel, The Man Within, was published in 1929. It told the story of Francis Andrews, a reluctant smuggler who, after being prodded by Elizabeth, a woman he has come to love, agrees to testify against his comrades after the gang's battle with Customs results in the murder of an agent.

Andrews' decision to do the right thing backfires when the gang is acquitted in court and takes revenge by killing Elizabeth. The novel was successful and enabled Greene to quit his job and write full time.

Unfortunately, Greene's next two novels, The Name Of Action (1930) and Rumour At Nightfall (1932) were unsuccessful, so he disowned them. His fourth book, Stamboul Train (1932) would be adapted in 1934 as a feature film called Orient Express - the novel's U.S. title.

To supplement his income, Greene worked as a freelance journalist, writing book and movie reviews. He co-edited the magazine Night and Day, but it folded in 1937 after one of his movie reviews caused an uproar.

Greene's review of the Shirley Temple film Wee Willie Winkie outraged the 20th Century Fox movie studio and resulted in a libel suit. In his review, he claimed that Temple displayed "an obvious coquetry" which appealed to "middle-aged men and clergymen."

Since the UK's dubious libel laws placed the accused at great legal disadvantage and could result in imprisonment in addition to the awarding of monetary damages, Graham Greene fled England and went to Mexico, which did not have an extradition treaty with the UK at that time.

Greene's time in Mexico would inspire him to write what many consider to be his greatest novel, The Power And The Glory (1940). It would be the first in a trilogy of Catholic-themed novels.

The trilogy, which included The Heart Of The Matter (1948) and The End Of The Affair (1951), would raise controversy with their meditations on the natures of sin and spirituality.

The Power And The Glory is set in 1930s Mexico - a time when the Mexican government sought to suppress the Catholic Church and its influence in the country. The main character is an unnamed Catholic priest in the state of Tabasco.

The alcoholic "whiskey priest" wanders about Tabasco trying to minister to the people as best he can. He is haunted by his past indiscretions; he once had an affair with a parishioner which resulted in her pregnancy.

When he is reunited with his illegitimate daughter, the priest finds that he can feel no remorse for his affair with her mother. But he comes to love Brigitta, the strange, evil-looking little girl he fathered.

The priest is being pursued by an unnamed police lieutenant whose job is to arrest him. The Lieutenant is a man of great contradiction and inner turmoil. An idealist who believes in justice, equality, and education for the poor, the Lieutenant is capable of great kindness - and great cruelty as well.

Thanks to traumatic experiences he had in his youth, the Lieutenant believes that the Church is corrupt to the core and all of its clergy are fundamentally evil. He has no problem hunting, arresting, and executing priests.

Although his latest quarry manages to escape, the Lieutenant, with the help of a Judas-like mestizo, lures the whiskey priest into a trap. The priest is asked to hear the confession of a dying man. Suspecting that he's walking into a trap, the priest feels compelled to do his duty.

He does find a dying man, but performing his priestly duty results in his capture. On the eve of the priest's execution, the Lieutenant attempts to enlist an ex-priest to hear the condemned man's confession. After the execution, the Lieutenant becomes convinced that he has "cleared the province of priests," but then another one arrives in town.

Due to their criticisms of Catholic orthodoxy and their Quietist themes, (looking within oneself through meditation to find God) in 1953, Cardinal Bernard Griffin of Westminster wrote a pastoral letter condemning Graham Greene's trilogy of Catholic-themed novels.

Griffin especially hated The Power And The Glory, the text of which he demanded that Greene make changes to. However, when Greene later met Pope Paul VI, the pontiff told him, "Mr. Greene, some aspects of your books are certain to offend some Catholics, but you should pay no attention to that."

Throughout his life, Graham Greene traveled to the far corners of the world, to what he called its wild and remote places. This led to him being recruited as an agent for MI6 - the British Secret Intelligence Service.

He was recruited by his older sister, Elisabeth, who worked for the organization. During World War II, he served as an MI6 agent and was posted to Sierra Leone. His supervisor and friend at MI6 was Kim Philby, who turned out to be a double agent for the Soviet Union.

Graham Greene used his experiences as an MI6 agent to write spy-themed suspense thrillers in addition to his literary works. The most famous of these is The Third Man (1949), a suspense novella set in postwar Vienna.

American writer Holly Martins arrives in Vienna, where his old friend Harry Lime has offered him work. He soon finds that Lime is dead, having been run over by a truck while crossing the street. Or so it seems.

Martins discovers that Lime faked his death; he's a wanted man, a psychopathic criminal who ran a wartime racket where he would steal penicillin from military hospitals, then dilute it and sell it on the black market.

The diluted antibiotics resulted in children being crippled both mentally and physically from meningitis. After the police take Martins to a hospital to see Lime's victims for himself, he agrees to help them take Lime down.

The Third Man was adapted as an acclaimed feature film, for which Greene wrote the screenplay himself. The movie was directed by Carol Reed and starred Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins and Orson Welles as Harry Lime.

Greene's 1955 novel, The Quiet American, would be adapted twice as a feature film. When it was first published, the novel was denounced as anti-American.

It told the story of Thomas Fowler, a 50-something year old British journalist in Saigon covering the war between the French and the Vietcong in Vietnam. Fowler meets Alden Pyle, the "quiet American" of the title who may be more than what he seems.

Pyle is a brilliant American scholar and professor who opposes the war being waged by the French and their American cronies. Fowler dismisses him as naive. After Pyle steals Fowler's Vietnamese mistress, the Englishman helps engineer the American's murder on the supposed pretext of helping the Vietnamese people.

The first film adaptation, released in 1958, starred Audie Murphy as Pyle and Sir Michael Redgrave as Fowler. The second adaptation, even more acclaimed than the first and more faithful to Greene's novel, starred Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine.

Greene wrote more great novels including Our Man In Havana (1958), which was criticized as being pro-Castro, and The Comedians (1966), a tale set in Haiti under the rule of the murderous U.S. backed dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier and his secret police, the Tonton Macoute.

Another classic novel was Travels With My Aunt (1969), which would be adapted as a film and Broadway play. During the last years of his life, Greene lived on Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where he met and became close friends with legendary actor / filmmaker Charlie Chaplin.

Graham Greene died in 1991 at the age of 86.

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Quote Of The Day

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"A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction."

- Graham Greene

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Vanguard Video

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Today's video features a complete reading of a collection of Graham Greene's short stories. Enjoy!