SOURCE: "Twenty-Seven Stories," in Partisan Review, Vol. XVI, No. 7, July, 1949, pp. 753-55.

In the following mixed evaluation of Nineteen Stories, Rosenfeld praises Greene's honest depiction of childhood but faults his attempts at confessional writing.

Graham Greene, who writes two kinds of books, serious novels and entertainments, is never as serious or entertaining a writer as when he writes a simple story about childhood, leaving out crooks, spies, confidential agents and his own brand of Anxiety. There are several such stories in the present collection [Nineteen Stories] and they are the best in the volume (three of them, in fact, are good), because they were written without the intention of distilling from the steam of the pot boiler a moral critique of our age. Which is to say that Greene is at his best when he is least himself.

For once the perspective is immediate. We come directly to...