Green, Henry. (1905 - 1973).
W o r k
< influenced by his domestic circumstances during WW I when the family house became a convalescent home for wounded officers
< the attempted suicide of one of the officers, his brother's death, "the lists of the dead each day in every paper" => reinforced in him an acute awareness of morality
Living (1929):
- concern: the commonplace rhythms, repetitions, and deprivations of Birmingham factory life
- style: highly abbreviated, eliminates definite articles and adjectives, experiments with verbless sentences
- the son of a factory owner reflects on a way of life monotonous for all classes the same: being born, going to school, working, being married, bearing children, and dying
- a brief interruption of the monotony: an exploited girl attempts to escape to Canada with her lover x but: returns to the routines of her life in Birmingham on finding out that she was not happy as she expected
Party Going (1939):
- concern: a young and smart set of party goers is delayed in their train journey for several hours by fog
- the group resort to the station hotel and look down on the masses of less privileged travellers below them
- their trivial gossip is overshadowed by the sudden illness of one girl of the group and by the raised subject of an air raid
Loving (1945):
- concern: servants of an upper-class family in Ireland during WW II
Quote
"Don't be afraid of life. Everything settles itself in the end."
From Concluding (1948).
Basics
(Photo: NY Times).
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Author
Henry Vincent Yorke. Aka Henry Green. (1905 - 1973). British. -
Work
Novelist. Author of Living (1929). -
Genre
Modernist fiction.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.