Background

He attended the Berkhamsted School, where his father was the headmaster. Unhappy at school, he once tried to run away and was subsequently sent to a psychiatrist. Although he enjoyed psychiatric analysis, he still suffered from boredom, which he occasionally tried to alleviate by playing Russian roulette with a loaded revolver.

At 21 he became an intellectual convert to Roman Catholicism, and in 1927 he married Vivien Dayrell-Browning, also a Roman Catholic.

Education

While working his way through Balliol College at Oxford, he took a job with a tobacco company, incorrectly thinking it would eventually take him to China. He then worked for a short time on a local paper.

Career

later books that exploited the conventions of the "thriller"--A Gun for Sale (1936), The Confidential Agent (1939), and The Ministry of Fear (1943)--he called "entertainments." Actually, these novels are no less skillfully written than such consciously "literary" novels as It's a Battlefield (1934) and England Made Me (1935), which reflect the social and political anxieties of the 1930's.

Works

• book

  • Twenty-one Stories (1954)

  • A Sense of Reality (1963)

  • May We Borrow Your Husband? (1967)

  • The Lost Childhood (1951)

  • Lord Rochester's Monkey (1974)

  • A Dream Diary (1995)

  • The Third Man (1950)

• confessional travel books

  • Journey Without Maps (1936)

  • The Lawless Roads (1939)

• novel

  • The Man Within (1929)

  • The Name of Action (1930)

  • Stamboul Train (1932)

  • Brighton Rock (1938)

  • The Heart of the Matter (1948)

  • The End of the Affair (1951)

  • The Quiet American (1955)

  • Our Man in Havana (1958)

  • The Comedians (1966)

  • A Burnt-out Case (1961)

  • Travels With My Aunt (1969)

  • The Honorary Consul (1973)

• play

  • The Living Room (1953)

  • The Potting Shed (1957)

  • The Complaisant Lover (1959)

• story

  • The Power and the Glory (1940)

• Other Work

  • Rumour at Nightfall (1931)

Connections

Wife:

Vivien Dayrell-Browning

Roman Catholic