英美短篇小 说Unit 8 Across the bridge.ppt

——Graham Greene Unit 8 Across the Bridge Graham Greene Born on October 2, 1904 in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. The fourth of six children, Greene was a shy and sensitive youth. He disliked sports and was often truant from school in order to read adventure stories by authors such as Rider Haggard and R. M. Ballantyne. These novels had a deep influence on him and helped shape his writing style. Educated at Balliol College, Oxford, and had a natural talent for writing. In 1926, he converted to Roman Catholicism. Graham Greene Greene adored T. S. Eliot and Herbert Read; his analyst introduced him to a literary circle. After he graduated, he worked as a sub-editor at the Times of London (1926-1930) and at the Spectators, where he was a film critic and a literary editor until 1940. Besides, during the WWII, he also worked for the British Foreign Office, and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) sent him to Sierra Leone. He later worked under Kim Philby, a future defector to the Soviet Union. Graham Greene Among all his relationships with women, the one with Catherine Walston was the most important. The role of Catherine as Greene’s mistress and muse, roughly between 1946 and 1957, has been an open secret to Greene scholars and among his family and friends for many years. Graham Greene The End of the Affair (1951) was partly based on this affair. In real life, Greene met Mrs. Walston after her conversion to Roman Catholicism, when she asked him to be her godfather. He was 42 then and internationally celebrated for novels; she was 30, and the mother of 6 children. Greene was always tortured by the affair, and left in his personal papers a fascinating trail of clues as to the importance of the relationship in his life, though he never revealed this affair in his autobiographies. As a writer Greene was very prolific and versatile. Many of his novels are based on his own experiences as an agent in the British Fore