Henry Green led a double life. As Henry Yorke, a descendant of the earl of Hardwicke and Baron Leconfield, he was a wealthy aristocrat, with a family fortune and an engineering plant in the British Midlands. As Henry Green (the pseudonym he settled on after trying out Henry Browne), he wrote nine of our century's most original novels, including Living, Party Going, Caught, and Loving all of which, with daringly experimental techniques, capture the psychological truths of ordinary life in dramatic, sometimes poignant, and often hilarious ways. Green also formed friendships and rivalries with many of his time's leading literary figures, including Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, Eudora Welty and Terry Southern. And he led an extravagantly messy personal life. Jeremy Treglown, the highly praised biographer of Roald Dahl, discusses Green's novels in close connection with his life his unusual camaraderie with factory workers, his sympathy for servants, his ambivalence about his peers, his drinking, and his extramarital affairs. Treglown also shows how Green's portrayal of everyday uncertainties mirrored his efforts to understand his weaknesses and the chaotic conduct of his life efforts whose literary results, John Updike has said, bring the rectangle of the printed page alive like little else in English fiction of this century. "Henry Green" was the pen name of Henry Yorke, an upper-class British businessman who between 1926 and 1952 produced 13 of the most innovative novels of the century, among them Blindness and Party Going. Born in 1905, Green was educated at Eton and Oxford but periodically made unconventional job choices e.g., factory worker and then volunteer fireman in London during the Blitz. Although a well-known figure both in high society and avant-garde literary circles, he led almost a double life and became fanatically protective of his writing persona. Sadly, his later years were eclipsed by alcoholism, and it has only been since his death in 1973 that he has been considered "a writer's writer's writer." Treglown (English, Univ. of Warwick) is the first to integrate Green's life and writing, using extensive interviews, some family papers, and other archives not previously available. Lack of formal approval from Green's son makes this an unauthorized biography and might ultimately explain why Treglown doesn't quite explain this most elusive man. Nevertheless, this volume, as the first full-length biographical study, is an essential starting point for understanding Green's amazing creations. For general and specialized libraries. Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ., Carbondale Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. Henry Green, once described by Eudora Welty as possessing "the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time," has become a footnote in literary history, another dead white male laid to rest at last. British critic Treglown offers a compelling reaffirmation of Green's stature in this first complete biography. A schoolmate and friend of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, Green came of age at Eton and Oxford in the 1920s but lived the literary life only at a distance; he was a businessman, running his family's engineering firm throughout his life while writing a series of experimental novels ( Living, Loving, and Party Going are the best known) that, at one time, were considered to be fundamental expressions of modernism. Treglown perceptively shows us why, noting that many of Green's books, unlike Waugh's and Powell's, focused on the lower classes, offering a view of "how people really live: their hopes, but also their compromises and defeats and the way those defeats may not be so bad after all." Why not take a chance and suggest a Henry Green novel for your book-discussion group? Bill Ott Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved "The Times Literary Supplement, International Book of the Year: Equally sympathetic to the strange life and strange novels." led a double life. As Henry Yorke, a descendant of the earl of Hardwicke and Baron Leconfield, he was a wealthy aristocrat, with a family fortune and an engineering plant in the British Midlands. As Henry Green (the pseudonym he settled on after trying out Henry Browne), he wrote nine of our century's most original novels, including Living, Party Going, Caught, and Loving all of which, with daringly experimental techniques, capture the psychological truths of ordinary life in dramatic, sometimes poignant, and often hilarious ways. Green also formed friendships and rivalries with many of his time's leading literary figures, including Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, Eudora Welty and Terry Southern. And he led an extravagantly messy personal life. Jeremy Treglown, the highly praised biographer of Roald Dahl, discusses Green's novels in close connection with his life his unusual camaraderie with factory workers, his sympathy for servants, his ambivalence about his peers, his dr