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There he might have stayed had it not been for his stubborn conviction that he could become a writer and his marriage to Vivien Dayrell-Browning, whom he had met at Oxford. She was a Roman Catholic, and in 1926 Greene had converted to her faith. He later recalled his feelings after formally being received into the church: "There was no joy in it at all, only a somber apprehension." Greene never took his religion lightly, and the Catholicism that would come to stamp his fiction served both as a stern gauge by which to measure the behavior of fallen mortals and as a powerful source of divine mercy.
Greene's first published novel, The Man Within (1929), enjoyed a modest success and was made into a film. This pattern was to be repeated throughout his career, for Greene and the movies virtually grew up together. He learned the economies of filmed narration -- the quick cuts, the disembodied perspective, the interpolated conversations -- used them in his books and then saw them re-employed in adaptations of his own work on the screen.
His greatest fiction spanned the years 1938 to '51: Brighton Rock (1938), The Heart of the Matter (1948), The End of the Affair (1951) and, most hauntingly, The Power and the Glory (1940). The pilgrimage of the nameless "whiskey priest," on the run in a Mexican state from a sectarian tyranny, remains a thrilling adventure of despair and irrational redemption.
For all his worldly success, Greene retained the attitudes dictated by his childhood: a dislike for the strong -- hence his increasing postwar opposition to the U.S. -- and a sympathy for the underdog, a category that came to include everyone from Fidel Castro to Kim Philby, a onetime friend and also a British intelligence officer who famously spied for and then defected to the Soviet Union. The last 30 or so years of his life were spent in a modest & apartment in an undistinguished building in Antibes, on the French Mediterranean. Long separated (but never divorced) from his wife, Greene wrote conscientiously some 300 words every day, among them the opening sentence of the second volume of his autobiography: "What a long road it has been."