Graham Greene as Publisher

Abstract

The account of Graham Greene telling Max Reinhardt that he missed publishing and was looking for something to do after he had written his five hundred words a day is deeply entrenched. But there is more to the story. Like most writers, Greene wanted a publisher who would do what he said, and perhaps this was what he thought he would find when he eventually accepted Ian Parsons’s offer of a literary editorship. “Graham Greene as Publisher” traces Greene’s journey through the publishing world from 1926, when he followed his five hundred words a day sorting grammar, redundancies, and clichés at The Times, through 1987 when—having worn many different hats during his years a full-blown publisher—he was touted for his part in the protest against the commercial pressures on editors and authors based on the principle that the author should call the tune.