Green was born near Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, into an educated family with successful business interests. His father Vincent Wodehouse Yorke, the son of John Reginald Yorke and Sophia Matilda de Tuyll de Serooskerken, was a wealthy landowner and industrialist in Birmingham. His mother, Hon. Maud Evelyn Wyndham, was daughter of the second Baron Leconfield. Green grew up in Gloucestershire and attended the New Beacon School in Sevenoaks and then Eton College, where he became a friend of fellow pupil Anthony Powell and wrote most of his first novel, "Blindness". He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford and there began a friendship and literary rivalry with Evelyn Waugh of Hertford College. At Oxford Yorke and Waugh were members of the Railway Club.