Walston, Catherine, 1916-1978

Lady Catherine Walston, neé Crompton, was born in 1916 in Rye, N.Y., to David and Lillian MacDonald (Sheridan) Crompton. Her father, an Englishman, was employed as a stock broker in New York City. She attended Barnard College but dropped out soon after meeting Henry "Harry" Walston during a skiing trip to New Hampshire. They were wed in England in 1935. Catherine Walston first met Graham Greene in 1946 and their relationship continued until her death from cancer in 1978.

Graham Henry Greene was born on Oct. 2, 1904 in Berkhamsted, England to Charles Henry Greene and Marion Raymond Greene. His father was headmaster of Berkhamsted School, which Greene attended from 1915 until 1921. He completed his formal education at Balliol College, Oxford, where he took a second in modern history in 1925. The next year Greene converted from Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, and, in 1927, married Vivien Dayrell Browning, a fellow Catholic. They had two children, Lucy Caroline and Francis. Greene, a prolific writer, is best known as a novelist, though he also wrote plays, short stories, and non-fiction. He was on the staff of The times, London from 1926 to 1930 and was literary editor of The spectator during 1940 and 1941. He contributed film criticism to the short-lived periodical Night and day (1937), and, in 1954, was the Indochina correspondent for The new republic. During World War II he worked for the British Foreign Office and was stationed in Africa. In 1977 he was a member of the Panamanian delegation to Washington for the signing of the Panama Canal Treaties. Greene died on April 3, 1991 in Vevey, Switzerland.