Although Graham Greene is widely recognised as a major twentieth-century British author, there is much more to be said about his relationship with the literature and culture of the 1930s, an area of increasing academic interest and importance. This chapter establishes the rich diversity and cultural significance of Greene’s 1930s literary output, and reconsiders it within the broader context of 1930s literary history: from the rise of key cultural movements such as Mass Observation; to the transformative impact on literary representation of the new mass media. It examines how the “thirties” were constructed in the British literary imagination through hugely influential interventions by George Orwell and Virginia Woolf, who saw the decade as a doomed experiment in combining art and politics, and as a cultural interregnum between the end of modernism and the beginning of the post-war era. It also charts some of the main discursive and conceptual contours of more recent critical approaches to the decade’s literary culture, from the seminal interventions of the 1970s and 1980s to the current focus on “the long 1930s,” which has repositioned the decade at the heart of twentieth-century British literary history.