Throughout the 1930s, Greene wrote novels, reviewed books and movies for the Spectator, and traveled through eastern Europe, Liberia, and Mexico. Stamboul Train (also published as The Orient Express) was the first of many commercial successes. Finally, pressed for money, he set out to write a work of popular fiction. At age 21 he converted to Roman Catholicism, later saying, 'I had to find a religion.to measure my evil against.' His first published novel, The Man Within, did well enough to earn him an advance from his publishers, but though Greene quit his job as a London Times subeditor to write full-time, his next two novels were unsuccessful. Greene spent his university years at Oxford 'drunk and debt-ridden,' and claimed to have played Russian roulette as an antidote to boredom. 'Greeneland' is a place of seedy bars and strained loyalties, of moral dissolution and physical decay. But although Greene produced some unabashedly commercial works-he called them 'entertainments,' to distinguish them from his novels-even his escapist fiction is rooted in the gritty realities he encountered around the globe. Known for his espionage thrillers set in exotic locales, Graham Greene is the writer who launched a thousand travel journalists. * The novel was copyrighted in 1958 and published in 1959, thus the disparity in dates. Also, Jeremy Northam does a fine turn in the novel's audio version. The 1959 film version stars Alec Guiness, Burl Ives, and Maureen O'Hara.and Noel Coward as Hawthorne. But when his fake reports start coming true things suddenly get more complicated and Havana becomes a threatening place. In return all he has to do is file a few reports. His adolescent daughter spends his money with a skill that amazes him, so when a mysterious Englishman offers him an extra income he's tempted. Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of power outages. Conceived as one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” it tells of MI6’s man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates today.

Our man in havana