Norman Sherry's The Life of Graham Greene, Volume One: 1904-1939 was a major event in literary biography and in publishing at large when it appeared in 1989. It was serialized in the London Sunday Times and elsewhere, and climbed to fourth place on the Sunday Times best-seller list. The Sunday Express named it biography of the decade, and it won the 1990 Edgar Allan Poe Award for best critical/ biographical study.

The dust jacket contains high praise from contemporary authors. Margaret Atwood calls it the "definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's most important writers," though it was the first biography of Greene and only the first of three planned volumes. Francis Steegmuller lauds it as "Probably the fullest and richest biography of a living novelist ever written--a heroic, thoughtful work, worthy of its extraordinary subject." Joyce Carol Oates writes that "Greene's prodigious energies and inspiration are well matched...