Henry Green (1905-1973) was the pen name of Henry Vincent
Yorke. Born near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, England, Green was
educated at Eton and Oxford before starting work at his family's
engineering firm, where he was employed for most of his life while
also writing novels. During World War II, Green served on the
London Fire Brigade. He wrote nine novels between 1926 and 1952,
most of which have been reissued by NYRB Classics.
Matthew Yorke is the grandson of Henry Green and the author
of three novels, including one book for young adults. He was born
and currently lives in London.
John Updike was the author of over twenty novels, including
Rabbit, Run and The Witches of Eastwick, along with several short
story collections and works of poetry and criticism.
Sebastian Yorke is the son of Henry Green and, with the late
novelist Emma Tennant, the father of Matthew Yorke.
"The written word is estranging, and Green liked it that way. He
famously wrote that prose should offer 'a gathering web of
insinuations . . . a long intimacy between strangers,' but that
intimacy should above all be silent. . . . His radio broadcasts
have a touch of the manifesto about them, as if laying down a path
for the novel of the future, a way to capture something we’ve lost,
some sense of 'what never can be said.'" —Michael Gorra
"With Green, we’re presented with a singular kind of artist who,
like the poets of ancient India and Greece, has nothing to offer us
but delight." —Amit Chaudhuri
"The experience of reading Green, or so I find, is far more
animating than the ordinary reading experience and extends far
beyond the usual confines: It can be almost physical, as if the
thought or sensation expressed on the page were being generated by
one’s own, not the author’s mind. . . . One is mesmerized,
thrilled, transported, often by the very recklessness entailed by
an underlying and urgent purity of vision." —Deborah Eisenberg
"Nearer than almost any other to the spirit and what might be
called the central nerve of our time." —Elizabeth Bowen
"The most gifted prose writer of his generation." —V.S.
Pritchett
"One of the few really considerable English novelists of our time."
—Angus Wilson
"I realized that in the used bookstore I had conflated the name of
Julien Green, the French American novelist who inspired Highsmith,
with that of Henry James, whom she imitated, to arrive by surprise
at one of the great writers in English: Henry Green, who made his
work with these kinds of mishearings, and of whom I had never even
heard." —Sarah Nicole Prickett, Bookforum
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