THE LOST CHILDHOOD And Other Essays

A collection of short places, largely critical, occasionally autobiographical, which provide a commentary of personal perception and original insight and subtle stimulus on the passing literary scene. If much of what Graham Greene interprets is shaded, slanted a private vision, a consciousness of sin and salvation which is applied to the terminal judgment, this is what lends the purpose if at the same time a bias of his analytic method. It is particularly evident in the five pieces on Henry James, "the puritan with a nose for the Pit", and the "sense of evil, religious in its intensity" which brought him to the of Catholicism. And although it was Marjorie Bowen's The of Milan which was to direct Greene toward a lifetime of writing, it is Henry James who casts a constant shadow in the many pieces here, on the divers figures of Conrad, Mauriac, Beatrix Potter, Samuel Butler, Francis Parkman, Havelock Ellis, Herbert Read, Fielding and Sterne, etc. etc. And a closing personal postscript, on a time when at 17 he was "fixed in boredom" and tested the temptation of a brother's gun, of a wartime scene, a film luncheon and "the voice of American capital"- Louis B. Mayer, of a book market, — complete the collection in which the estimates are sparked by the individual response and an inward view. For an appreciative, rather than an appreciable, market.