Graham Greene
1904–1991 · Novelist, journalist
Read history at Balliol, graduated 1925 with a second. Sixty-seven years of writing and over twenty-five novels followed.
Graham Greene read history at Balliol College and graduated in 1925 with a second-class degree. After Oxford he worked briefly as a private tutor before turning to journalism, and from there to fiction; the career that followed ran for sixty-seven years and produced over twenty-five novels.
Greene's Oxford was the late phase of the Waugh–Acton generation but he was a different kind of student — bookish, restless, and outside the showier circles. He left almost no Oxford-set fiction behind, and his Catholic, political, foreign-correspondence concerns took his work elsewhere: Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti. The Balliol degree is a starting line, not a setting. He died in Switzerland in 1991 and is buried in the Corseaux cemetery near Vevey.
Sources: Wikipedia: Graham Greene
Last verified: Sat May 02 2026 01:00:00 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)