Celebrating Graham Greene

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 10.04.04 | 7:16 PM ET

Saturday marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Graham Greene and tributes abounded. I heard a surprisingly nuanced exploration of Greene’s life and work on NPR. And in Friday’s Los Angeles Times, Pico Iyer offered an eloquent tribute to the novelist and occasional travel writer. Greene, Iyer wrote, “made doubt his eternal creed and tried always to find the human, ambiguous truth that lay beyond all slogans or ideologies. And Greene’s characteristic blend of realism and conscience — his determination to see the world in all its fallenness and detail and yet never to give up on it entirely — seems closer to what many are hungering for these days than the bromides of politician or pundit.”