The Lawless Roads

Description

In 1938 Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico to discover the state of the country and its people in the aftermath of the brutal anti-clerical purges of President Calles. His journey took him through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, where all the churches had been destroyed or closed and the priests driven out or shot. The experiences were the inspiration for The Power and the Glory ('Graham Greene's masterpiece' - John Updike).

Graham Greene was born in 1904. He worked as a journalist and critic, and in 1940 became literary editor of the Spectator. He was later employed by the Foreign Office. As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography, two of biography and four books for children. He also wrote hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. He died in April 1991.

Journey Without Maps and The Lawless Roads reveal Greene's ravening spiritual hunger, a desperate need to touch rock bottom within the self and in the humanly created world * Times Higher Education Supplement * Greene's originality lay in his gifts as a traveller. He had the foreign ear and eye for the strangeness of ordinary life and its ordinary crises * Guardian * Infuses the geography of distant places with an intense understanding of individual human destiny at play under startling and oppressive social conditions * Newsday * The Lawless Roads, a masterpiece, embraces the spiritual and political conflict of the twentieth century, the cruelty of social engineers, the corruption of politicians and the wan humanity of martyrs made heroic by grace * Independent * Greene's work is a crucial link between the two most dynamic cultures of the present day, the Hispanic and the Anglo-American * Observer *