Henry Green (1) (1905–1973)
Auteur de Loving / Living / Party Going
Pour les autres auteurs qui s'appellent Henry Green, voyez la page de désambigüisation.
A propos de l'auteur
Writing under the pseudonym Henry Green, Henry Vincent Yorke kept his life as a wealthy industrialist separate from his literary persona. Although he had friends who were authors, he did not travel in literary circles and refused to be photographed, to protect his anonymity. Yorke was born in 1905 afficher plus in Gloucestershire, England, and worked as a laborer before becoming managing director of a food engineering firm. From the publication of his first book Blindness (1926), which was begun when he was 17 years old and a student at Eton, he was admired for his unfailing sense of dialogue and characterization for all classes of British life. Green's last novel, Nothing, was published in 1950. Although he is still relatively unknown in the United States, he is recognized by authors such as John Updike and W. H. Auden as a masterful storyteller and one of the greatest English writers of the 20th century. He died in 1973 (Bowker Author Biography) afficher moins
Œuvres de Henry Green
Green Henry (Henry Vincent Yorke) 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
New Writing and Daylight : Summer 1943 — Contributeur — 2 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom légal
- Yorke, Henry Vincent
- Date de naissance
- 1905-10-29
- Date de décès
- 1973-12-13
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- UK
- Lieu de naissance
- Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, England, UK
- Lieu du décès
- London, England, UK
- Lieux de résidence
- Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, England, UK (birth)
London, England, UK (death) - Études
- Eton College
Oxford University - Professions
- managing director (engineering business)
novelist
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 16
- Aussi par
- 1
- Membres
- 3,938
- Popularité
- #6,422
- Évaluation
- 3.5
- Critiques
- 86
- ISBN
- 125
- Langues
- 6
- Favoris
- 19
Party Going is about a group of people stuck at a train station for a few hours due to heavy fog - a concept famously ripped off by Seinfeld in the episode where the characters are stuck at a mall parking garage because they can’t remember where they parked (but maybe Jerry Seinfeld didn’t, in fact, adopt the idea from Henry Green, who am I to say). These are terrible, shallow people, much like their later parking garage stranded brethren. Where they differ, however, is in their being much higher up in social class, and in being much more boring.
Green’s second novel, Living (Party Going was his third), focused on the working class of Birmingham, people like those who worked in Green’s family owned factory. For my money those characters were far more worth reading about than these ones who inhabit a moneyed class like Green himself. Trying to survive the daily grind is simply more interesting than trying to figure out who sent a letter to a newspaper about a socialite missing an embassy party he wasn’t actually invited to.
So this became a novel for me that was not that easy to want to resume reading. What rewards it gave were to be found in the prose construction, which is top notch - Green was, in reality, a writer’s writer. Here’s how the novel begins:
The driving rhythm of that sentence I find remarkable and most enjoyable! Could be up there with my favorite opening lines of any novel I’ve read (Lolita’s, not that you asked, are my best ever). What follows from there is a bunch of nonsense described most exquisitely. If I had to lay out one passage as evidence that this book is worth reading despite all the nonsense, I think it would be this one, describing the moment the artificial lights in the station’s waiting area turn on above the massed crowd of delayed passengers:
Good Lord that’s good.… (plus d'informations)