Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, April 4, 1991                   TAG: 9104050056
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

GRAHAM GREENE DIES AT AGE 86/ AUTHOR'S CAREER LASTED OVER 50 YEARS

A master storyteller who wrote from his experiences roaming the back roads of the world, Greene had been hospitalized for several days. Greene had been suffering from a blood disease, said Robert Bertschy, administrator of La Providence Hospital in Vevey. But the specific cause of his death was not immediately given.

Born in England, Greene set the best of his two dozen novels amid decay and revolution in Mexico, Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, Cuba and Haiti.

Author of such celebrated novels as "The Power and the Glory," "The Heart of the Matter," "Our Man in Havana," "The Comedians" and "The Quiet American," Greene was an enormously popular novelist despite the gloominess of much of his work.

He created characters who are among the most tormented in modern fiction. They are exiles who have lost faith in their God, their country or themselves who are goaded into action on behalf of a friend or a cause.

Greene's work spanned half a century and inspired two generations of journalists, novelists and travel writers.

Greene was one of a distinguished group of British literary expatriates - including D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley - who launched their writing careers after leaving England, which they found dull and stifling in the years immediately after World War I.

Greene was so bored as a young man that he played Russian roulette with a loaded pistol. But he later came up with a better way to relieve the ennui: constant travel.

Greene witnessed a number of this century's violent upheavals and conflicts. He was in Prague in 1948 when the Communists took over Czechoslovakia; he witnessed the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in 1953; he was nearly hit by mortar fire while covering the 1967 Arab-Israeli war for a magazine. And he was in Vietnam long before the parade of prize-winning journalists arrived there in the 1960s.

A critic of totalitarianism on the right and the left, Greene nevertheless befriended Cuba's Fidel Castro, Panama's Omar Torrijos and Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega. Often critical of American foreign policy, Greene strongly condemned the U.S. 1989 invasion of Panama.

Greene's first published novel was "The Man Within," which came out in 1929 when the author was 25. Its success allowed Greene to quit his newspaper job and write full time.

More than 40 years later he was at the top of his powers with "The Honorary Consul," published in 1973 to critical acclaim and best-seller popularity.

Over the years he also sold the film rights to a number of his novels, including "The Comedians" (1966), starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, about life under the terrifying reign of Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier in Haiti.

Greene was born Oct. 2, 1904, in Berkhamsted, a small town north of London where his father was headmaster of a school. He briefly belonged to the Communist Party at Oxford, which later led the U.S. government to label him a "prohibited immigrant."

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