It’s the birthday of British novelist, industrialist, and eccentric Henry Green (1905-1973), real name Henry Vincent Yorke, once famously called by The Paris Review a “writer’s writer’s writer.” You won’t have heard of him (five life points to you if I’m wrong), so here are a few folks who have: W.H. Auden called Green “the best English novelist alive,” Eudora Welty called him “the most interesting and vital imagination in English fiction in our time,” T.S. Eliot said that Green’s writing proved that the “creative advance in our age is in prose fiction,” and John Updike, Anthony Burgess, and Evelyn Waugh all had the highest praise for him.

Green was in some ways counter-cultural and anti-intellectual, and he insisted on anonymity, not only using a pseudonym but refusing to be photographed except from behind.

Green was born in Gloucestershire, England, into a wealthy family with middle names like Reginald and Wodehouse, and there was a baron thrown in there somewhere on his mother’s side. He studied at Eton College (working on his first novel, Blindness, there), then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he evidently ignored his tutor, C.S. Lewis, and instead went to the movies twice a day. He left Oxford without a degree in 1926, the same year that Blindness was published, and joined the family business, starting on the factory floor and working his way up to managing director. He married his cousin Adelaide in 1929 (put your eyebrows down, she was just a *second* cousin), the same year he published Living; the novel is about the workers in an iron foundry in the late 1920s, one of whom, Lily, seeks a life with a wider scope than the one she feels trapped in. Party Going came out in 1939 and is about a wealthy, spoiled group of young people trapped by fog in a railway hotel. The entire story takes place in the hotel over a period of four hours.

When the war broke out, Green wrote the memoir Pack My Bag (1940) and sent his wife and young son to the countryside while he stayed in London and joined the Auxiliary Fire Service and had a fairly enjoyable time serving as a fireman and having lots of affairs. His novel Caught (1943) was based heavily on these wartime experiences. In 1945 he published Loving, considered his masterpiece, about a group of English servants living it up in a great Irish house during the war. Green wrote nine novels in all, and Loving, Living, and Party Going are often sold together in one volume (like here). Green’s dialogue is supposed to be brilliant and without peer.

In the last 20 years of his life, Green wrote nothing. He drank and became more reclusive and more mysterious. In the years since his death, he’s continued to be considered one of the most brilliant and lyrical satirists of the 20th century, and places like The New Yorker and The Atlantic can’t stop writing about him. Might be worth checking him out to see what all the fuss is about.

Have a dim Monday lit by the incandescent red and orange of changing leaves and stay scrupulously honest to the data.