Henry Green has been called a "writer's writer's writer" because of the high praise he has received from fellow literary practitioners such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, V. S. Pritchett, Eudora Welty, and John Updike. Eliot went so far as to use Green as his single example of "creative advance in our age" in a 1953 interview, while Auden called him "the best English novelist alive" at about the same time. Despite this praise from other writers, Green's work remains relatively unknown to the general reading public. Perhaps the very magnitude of the praise has created an impression that his work is esoteric and formally forbidding, an impression that may have been strengthened by the mystery surrounding Green himself: the fact that "Henry Green" is a pseudonym meant to conceal the identity of Henry Vincent Yorke, successful industrialist; Green's own coyness about his double identity; his refusal...