 As a novelist Greene wove the characters he met and the places where he lived into the fabric of his novels.Greene first left Europe at 30 years of age in 1935 on a trip to Liberia that produced the travel book "Journey Without Maps".His 1938 trip to Mexico to see the effects of the government's campaign of forced anti-Catholic secularisation was paid for by the publishing company Longman, thanks to his friendship with Tom Burns.