Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green

Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green by Treglown, Jeremy. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780679433033.

Henry Green led a double life. As Henry Yorke, a descendant of the earl of Hardwicke and Baron Leconfield, he was a wealthy aristocrat, with a family fortune and an engineering plant in the British Midlands. As Henry Green (the pseudonym he settled on after trying out Henry Browne), he wrote nine of our centurys most original novels, including Living, Party Going, Caught, and Loving all of which, with daringly experimental techniques, capture the psychological truths of ordinary life in dramatic, sometimes poignant, and often hilarious ways. Green also formed friendships and rivalries with many of his times leading literary figures, including Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, Eudora Welty and Terry Southern. And he led an extravagantly messy personal life. Jeremy Treglown, the highly praised biographer of Roald Dahl, discusses Greens novels in close connection with his life his unusual camaraderie with factory workers, his sympathy for servants, his ambivalence about his peers, his drinking, and his extramarital affairs. Treglown also shows how Greens portrayal of everyday uncertainties mirrored his efforts to understand his weaknesses and the chaotic conduct of his life efforts whose literary results, John Updike has said, bring the rectangle of the printed page alive like little else in English fiction of this century.