Then, while walking down the streets of London, he said he suddenly saw "the three chunks": the beginning, the middle and the end.

The Third Man, his 24th book, was published shortly afterward in 1950. "Damn it," he wrote, "I'm not played out yet."

To prove this, Penguin Books celebrates the centennial of Greene's birth on Oct. 2 by releasing deluxe editions of his greatest works with introductions by literary luminaries such as Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee; Gloria Emerson, former New York Times correspondent and author of Loving Graham Greene; and Michael Gorra, Smith College professor of English and book critic.

"He's terribly important," Gorra says. "He was one of the first British writers to deal with the relationship between 'first world' and Third World countries (and) issues about the responsibility (of) rich countries to poor countries."

In The Quiet American (Penguin, $14), published in 1955, Greene criticized the war over French Indochina, now Vietnam, as well as America's early involvement in Southeast Asia.

Many Americans were offended by the character Alden Pyle, an American who is "so young, so naïve, so democratic in the face of the complex oriental mind," according to Norman Sherry, who wrote The Life of Graham Greene, Volumes I, II and III.

Despite accusations that he was anti-American, Greene was praised for his depiction of Vietnam. U.S. journalists on their way to Vietnam even carried copies of the novel in their backpacks, Sherry writes.

The novel, written years before the Vietnam War, was prophetic, Gorra writes. "Americans writing later about the Vietnamese debacle, when they in turn lost to the Viet Cong, felt American policymakers should have listened to Greene."