Reading Order
Travels with My AuntGraham Greene Travels with My Aunt Reading Order
Graham Greene's Travels with My Aunt (1969) is his most comic novel — the story of Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager of no imagination whatsoever, who is pulled into a life of travel and adventure by his eccentric Aunt Augusta, who has been involved in smuggling, drugs, and international crime for most of her life. The novel is Greene's holiday from his own moral seriousness — a picaresque comedy organized around the contrast between Henry's total conventionality and Augusta's total unconventionality, and one of the most purely enjoyable novels in his career.
Where to start
Our Man in Havana
Complete Travels with My Aunt Book List
- 1Buy
Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene·1958·The essential companion in Greene's comedies — Wormold's comic spy adventure in pre-revolutionary Cuba; the comparison shows the range of Greene's comedy from the political satire of Our Man in Havana to the picaresque holiday of Travels with My Aunt. - 2Buy
Travels with My Aunt
Graham Greene·1969·The novel itself — Henry Pulling, Aunt Augusta, the dog Biscuit, and the journey from Brighton to Paraguay. - 3Buy
The Quiet American
Graham Greene·1955·The essential serious companion — the contrast between Travels with My Aunt's comedy and The Quiet American's moral gravity shows the full range of Greene's formal possibilities. - 4Buy
Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis·1954·Amis's comic novel about Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer who cannot hide his contempt for the academic world he inhabits — the essential companion in the British comic tradition of the passive ordinary man who is liberated from his conventions by a more vital outsider; the comparison with Henry Pulling and Aunt Augusta shows the range of the type. - 5Buy
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding·1749·Fielding's picaresque novel — the foundational British picaresque and the essential predecessor to Travels with My Aunt's comic journey through the underworld of European crime and eccentricity; the comparison shows what Greene inherits from the eighteenth-century picaresque tradition. - 6Buy
Catch-22
Joseph Heller·1961·Heller's satirical war novel — the essential American parallel in the tradition of the comic novel about an ordinary man trapped in a world of institutional absurdity; the comparison with Travels with My Aunt shows how the same formal interest in the conventional man liberated by chaos looks in an American wartime context. - 7Buy
The Man Who Was Thursday
G.K. Chesterton·1908·Chesterton's philosophical thriller about a secret anarchist council — the earlier British comic thriller in the tradition Travels with My Aunt inhabits; the comparison shows what the British comedy of moral incongruity looks like before Greene and after.
Travels with My Aunt — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Travels with My Aunt about?
Travels with My Aunt (1969) follows Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager who meets his unconventional Aunt Augusta at his mother's funeral and is gradually pulled into a life of travel, drugs, smuggling, and international adventure. The novel is a picaresque comedy organized around the contrast between Henry's total conventionality and Augusta's total unconventionality.
Is Travels with My Aunt autobiographical?
Travels with My Aunt is not autobiographical in the specific way that A Burnt-Out Case is, but Aunt Augusta's delight in life, travel, and rule-breaking reflects Greene's own personality more closely than any of his serious protagonists. The novel was written during a period of relative happiness in Greene's life, after decades of moral gloom.
Is Travels with My Aunt a good first Graham Greene novel?
Travels with My Aunt is one of the most accessible entry points to Greene — it is his funniest and most picaresque novel, and it requires no familiarity with his Catholic theology or his political concerns. But Our Man in Havana or Brighton Rock are better first Greenes if you want to understand what makes him distinctive as a novelist; Travels with My Aunt is better approached as a holiday from Greene's seriousness after you know his major work.
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