Books: Early Graham Greene

THE SHIPWRECKED (244 pp.)—Graham Greene—Viking ($3).

In 1935 a little-known English writer published his seventh novel, England Made Me. The critics brushed it off with mild praise; a writer whose pages steamed with so much excitement could not also be significant. When a U.S. publisher imported the book, it sold exactly 933 copies. But now that Graham Greene has become famous as a literary analyst of sin and salvation, it is being reissued as The Shipwrecked.

Swift but erratic in pace, and streaked with a social consciousness that was quickly to fade from his later novels, The Shipwrecked is written in the vibrato...