Graham Greene

Greene converted to Catholicism in 1926, partly to marry Vivien Dayrell-Browning, and spent the rest of his career mining the friction between sin and grace that conversion gave him. Depressive since adolescence, he worked for MI6 during the Second World War under the eventual Soviet double agent Kim Philby, an experience that fed his lifelong fascination with betrayal.

Commissioned by his English publisher to report on Mexico's anticlerical purges in 1938, he turned the trip into The Power and the Glory (1940). He kept traveling to the world's trouble spots (Vietnam, Haiti, the Congo, Cuba), turning each into what critics called 'Greeneland,' his moral geography of exile and doubt. He divided his fiction between serious 'novels' and lighter 'entertainments,' was shortlisted for the Nobel repeatedly without ever winning it, and died in Switzerland in 1991.