A collection of short stories, journalism pieces, and various writings by the esteemed twentieth-century English novelist Henry Green.Surviving presents a miscellany of Henry Green's writing, and is as reflective of his extraordinary and unclassifiable genius for the word as any of his great novels from Living to Loving to Nothing. Readers will find remarkable stories from the 1920s and 1930s; Green's telling of his time in the London Fire Brigade during the Blitz; a short, unpublished play, Journey out of Spain; journalism; and the hilarious interview that Terry Southern conducted for The Paris Review. Edited by the novelist Matthew Yorke, Green's grandson, Surviving also includes a memoir by Green's son, Sebastian Yorke, that is a brilliant portrait of this maverick master.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY SEBASTIAN FAULKSHenry Green, whom W. H. Auden called 'the finest living English novelist', is the most neglected writer of the last century and the one most deserving of rediscovery by a new generation. This volume brings together three of Henry Green's intensely original novels. Loving explored class distinctions through the medium of love and brilliantly contrasts the lives of servants and masters in an Irish castle during World War Two, Living of workers and owners in a Birmingham iron foundry. Party Going is a brilliant comedy of manners, presenting a party of wealthy travellers stranded by fog in a London railway hotel while throngs of workers await trains in the station below.

Doting, the last of Henry Green's novels, is, as its title would suggest, a story of aging and yearning in which a wife and a brash young woman run hilarious circles around a hapless hardworking civil servant suddenly seized by long dormant desire. Like its immediate predecessor Nothing, it stands out from the rest of his work in being composed almost entirely of dialogue, and in both books, Green's fascination with the extravagance, ambiguity, absurdity, and unintentional implications and consequences of everyday human communication leads to scenes that are as grimly funny as they are deeply sad.

Green remains a dim figure for many Americans. He stopped writing in 1952, at age 47, with just nine novels and a memoir behind him. In the last years of his life-he died in 1973-he became a kind of British Thomas Pynchon, agreeing to be photographed only from behind. But those who knew him often revered him. W. H. Auden called him the finest living English novelist. His real name was Henry Vincent Yorke. The son of a wealthy Birmingham industrialist, he was educated at Eton and Oxford but never completed his degree. He became managing director of the family factory, which made beer-bottling machines. But first he spent a year on the factory floor with the ordinary workers, and his fiction is forever marked by an understanding of the English at all levels of society, something rare in class-bound British literature. Loving is a classic upstairs-downstairs story, with the emphasis on downstairs. You see the life of a great Irish country house during World War II through the eyes of its mostly British servants, who make a world of their own during a period when their masters are away. Green's generosity towards even the most scheming and rascally of them offers a lesson you never forget. One of his most admired works, Loving describes life above and below stairs in an Irish country house during the Second World War. In the absence of their employers the Tennants, the servants enact their own battles and conflict amid rumours about the war in Europe; invading one another's provinces of authority to create an anarchic environment of self-seeking behaviour, pilfering, gossip and love. "Loving stands, together with Living, as the masterpiece of this disciplined, poetic and grimly realistic, witty and melancholy, amorous and austere voluptuary-comic, richly entertaining-haunting and poetic-writer." – TLS "Green's works live with ever-brightening intensity-it's like dancing with Nijinsky or Astaire, who lead you effortlessly on." – The Wall Street Journal "Green's novels- have become, with time, photographs of a vanished England -Green's human qualities – his love of work and laughter; his absolute empathy; his sense of splendour amid loss – make him a precious witness to any age." – John Updike "Green's books are solid and glittering as gems." – Anthony Burgess

Henry Green's first novel, and the book that began his career as a master of British modernismBlindness—Henry Green's first novel, begun while he was still at Eton and finished before he left university—is the story of John Haye, a young student with literary airs. It starts with an excerpt from his diary, brimming with excitement and affectation and curiosity about life and literature. Then a freak accident robs John of his sight, plunging him into despair. Forced to live with his high-handed, horsey stepmother in the country, John begins a weird dalliance with a girl named Joan, leading to a new determination. Blindness is the curse of youth and inexperience and love and ambition, but blindness, John will discover, can also be the source of vision.

Years ago, Jane Weatherby had a torrid affair with John Pomfret, the husband of her best friend. Divorces ensued. World War II happened. Prewar partying gave way to postwar austerity, and Jane and John's now-grown children, Philip and Mary, both as serious and sober as their parents were not, seem earnestly bent on marriage, which John and Jane consider a mistake. The two old lovers conspire against the two young lovers, and nothing turns out quite as expected. Nothing, like the closely related Doting, is a book that is almost entirely composed in dialogue, since in these late novels nothing so interested Green as how words resist, twist, and expose our intentions; how they fail us, lead us on, make fools of us, and may, in spite of ourselves, even save us, at least for a time. Nothing spills over with the bizarre and delicious comedy and poetry of human incoherence.

Back is, according to Jeremy Treglown in his introduction, "Henry Green's most extended attempt to plumb the world of the hunted - and haunted". First published in 1946, it has indeed remained one of Green's most haunting, elegiac novels and one of the most enduring to have focused on the individual human tragedy of the war.ReviewFirst published in England in 1946, this takes its place with his other titles- Loving, Nothing, etc. Full of air and fluff and rose light, and sometimes more serious too, Back is about Charley Summers- a very quiet man who returns from war and a German prison camp with a couple of strikes against him; his lady love Rose is dead and he now has a peg leg. Set for the most part in a suburb and in an office in London, Charley tries to adjust to a Roseless world- a world which insists on being diffused with rose colors, rose words and horrid rose puns. Dead Rose devours him on the one hand and government contracts (he deals in parabolam, bird droppings, needle valves, etc.) on the other, and one day he meets what he supposes to be Rose. Actually she is Nance, Rose's half-sister-through a misdemeanor on Rose's father's part. There are unholy coincidences scattered throughout which give the impression that this Henry Green world is a wild, unsafe, but haphazardly genteel place to live. The skillful coupling of love talk and office terminology, the dexterous handling of characters who seem at first glance to be picked bone clean but who turn into cream, and the view of a world just a little off center make Back a delightful, wispy and original experience. For his established audience.—Kirkus Reviews"Green belongs to the mad tradition in English literature—Sterne, Carroll, Firbank, and Mrs. Woolf." --V. S. Pritchett"Nobody writes novels quite like Henry Green . . . His characters . . . dance to a tune of his own as precise and stylized as a sonata."—New York Herald Tribune"The best writer of his time." --Rebecca West"Green's books remain solid and glittering as gems." --Anthony Burgess About the AuthorHenry Green was the pen-name of Henry Yorke, the son of a prosperous Midlands family with aristocratic roots. He was born in 1905 near Tewkesbury and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He entered the family business—producing beer-bottling machines—on the factory floor, and went on to run the firm while writing novels in his spare time. He is the author of Pack My Bag, a memoir, and nine novels including Blindness, Nothing, and Doting. Green died in 1973.

Dazzling, daring and full of original insight and wit, Henry Green offers a unique view of a class-ridden Britain enduring both war and its aftermath. In the apocalyptic atmosphere of the Blitz, so brilliantly evoked in Caught, gossip spreads like wildfire and the lives of two men are torn apart. In Back, Charley, an amputee, returns from a prison camp to his village and the grave of the woman he loved. Concluding was Green's own favourite of his novels and tells the story of a summer's day and a schoolgirl's disappearance.The text of Caught used in this edition is based on Green's original manuscript, which was censored by the publisher on first publication, but can be read now for the first time in unexpurgated form.