Graham Greene, who died on 3 April, 1991, at the age of 86, was a prolific author who began writing in the 1920s and continued up until his death.

His output included more than 20 novels, several plays and screenplays, four collections of short stories, three travel books and two autobiographies.

Many of his books, such as Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair and The Third Man, were adapted into films and he remains a widely read and popular writer today.

Henry Graham Greene was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, on 2 October, 1904, the fourth of six children. His parents, Charles and Marion were first cousins in a large and influential family that included the Greene King brewery owners and his brother Hugh would become Director-General of the BBC.

He attended the Berkhamsted boarding school where his father was headmaster. There he suffered severe depression and was bullied, causing him to attempt suicide several times and undergo six month’s psychoanalysis (suicide and inner struggle would be recurring themes in his work).

In 1925, he published his first only volume of poetry, Babbling April, while studying at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating, Mr Greene unsuccessfully took up journalism, first in Nottingham, then as a sub-editor at The Times.

On the publication of his novel, The Man Within, in 1929, he abandoned journalism and became a full-time novelist, though his next two novels were disastrous. But in 1932 he scored his first success with Stamboul Train. It was published in America as Orient Express and adapted as a film two years later.

Mr Greene saw his fiction falling into one of two distinctions: literary or “entertainments”. He hoped his reputation would be based on the former, a group which included The Power and the Glory and James Tait Black Prize-winning for The Heart of the Matter, while his “entertainments” tended be thrillers such as Brighton Rock and Our Man in Havana.

However, the “entertainments” were far from potboilers and contained many philosophical and moral elements. Many of them were influenced by his Catholicism and imbibed the experience of his broad travelling. He also used his novels as platforms for his left-leaning political views, such as The Quiet American, set in French-occupied Vietnam.

He married Vivien Dayrell-Browning in 1927 and they had two children, Lucy and Francis. Francis died in 1987. In 1948 Mr Greene left the family for Catherine Walston, but, because he was Catholic, remained married to Vivien until his death.

He died and was buried in Switzerland where he had spent the last years of life.