[GREENE, Graham]. Bernard DIEDERICH. Somoza: American Made Dictator [later published as ‘Somoza: And the legacy of U.S. involvement in Central America’].

Graham Greene’s Copy

[GREENE, Graham]. Bernard DIEDERICH. Somoza: American Made Dictator [later published as ‘Somoza: And the legacy of U.S. involvement in Central America’]. New York: E. P. Dutton. 1981.

8vo. Original card wrappers; pp. ix, [5], 354, [1 (blank)]; light wear to wrappers, edges and corners a little rubbed and bumped, minor loss to paper covering at foot of spine, light creasing and small surface mark to back cover; very good; Graham Greene’s copy (see below).

Uncorrected proof copy, owned and signed by Graham Greene, linking two writers whose work exposed the realities of twentieth-century dictatorship.

Bernard Diederich (1926–2020) led a life that might have come from the pages of a Graham Greene novel. Born into an Irish German family in Christchurch, New Zealand, and raised in nearby Mākara, he left school to work as a shipping clerk before sailing to San Francisco in 1943, where he enlisted in the US Marines. In 1949 he sailed to Haiti, settling in Port-au-Prince, and founding and editing the Haiti Sun, an English-language weekly, also contributing regularly to The New York Times and The Daily Telegraph. His increasingly outspoken reporting on François 'Papa Doc' Duvalier led to his imprisonment and expulsion from Haiti in 1962, following which he became a Time-Life correspondent based in the Dominican Republic.

In the acknowledgements to Somoza, Diederich thanks 'the forbearance of [his] family who suffered bringing a third dictator into [their] home'. As Walter Goodman observed in the New York Times on the book's publication, Diederich 'has made a specialty of writing about some of the least likable figures in contemporary history – first Duvalier of Haiti and Trujillo of the Dominican Republic and now the Somozas of Nicaragua’. Covering the rise of Anastasio 'Tacho' Somoza García in the 1930s, and the assassination of his exiled son in 1980, Somoza traces half a century of authoritarian rule as well as the dynasty's close relationship with the United States.

This uncorrected proof of Diederich's book, issued with a different (arguably preferable) title to the published version, was Graham Greene's copy, signed by him to the title page. Greene and Diederich met in 1954, when the novelist visited Haiti and Diederich interviewed him for the Haiti Sun. Greene's understanding of Haiti, and the political vision that informed The Comedians (1966), his most direct fictional engagement with modern dictatorship, was largely attributable to Diederich's journalism and friendship, which would also inform Greene's later engagement with the politics of Latin America. It was Diederich who persuaded Greene to meet the de facto head of Panama General Omar Torrijos, a relationship that resulted in Greene’s Getting to Know the General: The Story of an Involvement (1984).

See Diederich, Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central America, 1954-1983 (2012).

SKU: 2124665