Professor Shelden's biography of Orwell is outstanding and well-researched. Prof. Shelden provides the important details of the molding of Eric Blair- boyhood, school, service in Burma for the Empire- and explains how each experience influenced young Blair yet he doesn't try to feed the reader psychobabble hogwash. Orwell's fitful rise as a writer is especially interesting. Prof. Shelden explains Orwell's various ideological wars and paints a portrait of a non-doctrinaire, humanist socialist who was a more astute critic of Stalinism or ideological socialism than anyone to his right. What I found refreshing about Prof. Shelden's account is that the reader finishes the bio without really knowing the writer's own politics. He allows Orwell to speak for himself.

One of my authors asked me recently about whether I wanted footnotes in a piece that he was writing. I told him that if he was making any claims that people might dispute, he should footnote the h... out of it. Michael Shelden doesn't do this. His biography is full of controversial claims but his critical apparatus is very weak. In fact, one of his claims, that a gardener at an uncle's home was a central figure in his life, doesn't seem to have any documented source at all.

If the claims were restricted to gardeners, this would not be an important detail, but Shelden makes an assortment of claims, identifying Greene as a homosexual, an antisemite, a closet fascist, and even insinuates that Greene was a murderer as well. Of all of these claims, only the antisemitism claim seems to have any merit and what merit there exists is for a weaker antisemitism than Shelden claims. The claim of homosexuality doesn't jibe with Shelden's own account of Greene's life.

Perhaps most amusing is that while Shelden is eager to point out Greene's fondness for deception, he doesn't seem to acknowledge the possibility that he himself was being deceived.

The negative reviews preceding mine certainly do not mince words in castigating Shelden's biography of Graham Greene. However, they offer nothing to refute Shelden's well documented research; they are simply expressions of displeasure (and possibly embarrassment--how do you reconcile your world-class super-sophisticated British novelist toting around a teddy-bear like Radar O'Reilly?) Although I have been fascinated by much of Greene's fiction, and will continue to read and re-read his best works, I think Shelden makes quite a good case that Greene was an extremely manipulative, bisexual, anti-Semitic, hypocrite who stood for nothing in his personal life. Indeed, Greene belongs with Rousseau, Hemingway, Brecht, et al., in Paul Johnson's famous book of misfits, Intellectuals. Greene's sham Catholicism is particularly galling, since he converted as a young man only as a means to win Vivien's hand, yet he used it for the rest of his life as a bogus defense against those who might question the sincerity and depth of his religious sentiments. As Shelden says, if one did not know that Greene was (allegedly) Catholic, it would be very difficult to read works like Brighton Rock or The Comedians as some kind of theological statement about grace and transcendence. Let's face it: Greene was only looking out for number one. There is nothing wrong with that, except if you are passing yourself off as a humanist.

I read the other reviews and I think people don't like a biography that doesn't polish a popular authors life. i found this biography to be very good. It piqued my interest in Graham Greene. I shall read another biography and compare the two. I will also read Graham Greene's Memoirs. No biography or autobiography should considered 100% fact because a biographer may interview someone with bad memory and miss certain cluw along his or her investigation. And autobiographers also tend to embellish things. So it's better to read more than one account of a persons life before making conclusions.