Graham Greene parents, Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene, were first cousins, both members of a large, influential family that included the owners of Greene King Brewery, bankers, and statesmen; his mother was cousin to Robert Louis Stevenson. Charles Greene was second master at Berkhamsted School, where the headmaster was Dr Thomas Fry, who was married to Charles' cousin. Another cousin was the right-wing pacifist Ben Greene, whose politics led to his internment during World War II. In his childhood, Greene spent his summers with his uncle, Sir William, at Harston House in Cambridgeshire. In Greene's description of his childhood, he
Graham Greene a major 20th-century novelist, and was praised by John Irving, prior to Greene's death, as "the most accomplished living novelist in the English language." Novelist Frederick Buechner called Greene's novel "The Power and the Glory" a "tremendous influence." By 1943 Greene had acquired the reputation of being the "leading English male novelist of his generation", and at the time of his death in 1991 had a reputation as a writer of both deeply serious novels on the theme of Catholicism, and of "suspense-filled stories of detection". Acclaimed during his lifetime, he was shortlisted in 1966 for the Nobel Prize for