LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Graham Greene: Stories
built 792 days ago
Synopsis: Adapted from the Graham Greene story The Basement Room, director Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol is told almost completely from a child's eye view-but it isn't a children's story. Young Read More
Source:
The literary style of Graham Greene was one of the most recognizable writing styles in twentieth-century English literature. The novels are written in lean, realistic prose, having clear, exciting plots (avoiding modernist experimentation, which might account for his popularity), and using cinematic visual sense in description. Yet, he concentrated on portraying the characters' internal lives, the mental, emotional, and spiritual depths. Usually, they are deeply troubled with internal, existential struggles, are world-weary, and cynical, finding themselves rootlessly existing in seedy and sordid circumstances. The stories usually occurred in poor, hot, and dusty tropical backwaters in countries such as Mexico, West Africa, Vietnam, Cuba, Haiti, and Argentina, which led to the the coining of the expression "Greeneland" to describe such settings.
Source:
‘‘The Destructors’’ disturbed its readers, yet it remains one of Greene’s most anthologized short stories. Despite its setting in post-World War II England, the story is universal in its reflection of human nature. The story contains many of Greene’s hallmarks, most importantly that of placing people who have the capacity for good and evil in situations where they must make a choice between the two. The boys in ‘‘The Destructors’’ are still young enough to be innocent, yet they make cruel and selfish choices. This story is ... a link to Greene’s earliest fiction in which he often portrayed young people being initiated into the adult world. Commenting on this story and three others (‘‘A Chance for Mr. Lever,’’ ‘‘Under the Garden,’’ and ‘‘Cheap in August’’), Greene declared that he was completely satisfied and had never written anything better.
Source:
Synopsis: The humorous title of this story taken from the novel by Graham Greene gives the viewer the wrong impression. The story concerns the residents of a once-posh hotel in Haiti and the fate of the country's people under the despotic dictator Papa Doc DuvaRead More
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Stories