A SORT OF LIFE. by Greene, Graham - 1971

London: The Bodley Head, 1971. 216 pp, 8" H. "Graham Greene writes: 'An autobiography is only 'a sort of life' - it contains less errors of fact thatn a biography, but it is of necessity even more selective: it begins later and it ends prematurely. If one cannot close a book of memories on the deathbed, any conclusion must be arbitrary, and I have preferred to finish this essay with the years of failure which followed the acceptance of my first novel. In another sense too a book like this can only be 'a sort of life', for in the course of sixty-six years I have spent almost as much time with imaginary characters as with real men and women. There is a fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of their past with irony. It is a legitimate method of self-defence. 'Look how absurd I was when I was young' forestalls cruel criticism, but it falsifies history. We were not Eminent Georgians. Those emotions were real when we felt them. Why should we be more ashamed of them than of the indifference of old age? I have tried, however unsuccessfully, to live again the follies and sentimentalities and exaggerations of the distant time, and to feel them, as I felt them then, without irony." Gift inscription in ink on the front free endpaper, minor wrinkling at the bottom of the spine. Dust jacket has been price-clipped, has light edge wear, light rubbing, minor browning at the top of the flaps and on the inside of the spine and flap-folds.. First Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good/Very Good-.