In the late 1930s, Graham Greene was commissioned to visit Mexico and find out how the inhabitants had reacted to the brutal anticlerical purges of President Calles. The Lawless Roads is his spellbinding record of his journey. Taking him through the tropical states of Chiapas and Tabasco, where all the churches had been destroyed or closed and the priests driven out or shot, it provided him with the setting and theme for one of his greatest novels, The Power and the Glory. This Penguin Classics edition features an introduction by David Rieff.