Lawrence G. Green was astonishing in his productivity with nearly forty books attached to his name some of which can be mentioned here: Great African Mysteries (1935), Strange Africa (1936), Old Africa Untamed (1940), Tavern of the Seas (1947), In the Land of the Afternoon (1949), Lords of the Last Frontier (1952), Karoo (1955), Great North Road (1961), I Heard the Old Men Say (1964), Full Many a Glorious Morning (1968), Harbours of Memory (1969), When the Journeys are Over (1972). As these titles clearly indicate, Green wrote mainly travelogues and popular literature which have prevented him from being seen and evaluated for what he was: a great writer. There is a prevailing class cultural  prejudice that a popular literary form cannot possibly be a mode through which a great writer can make a lasting contribution to a national culture. Lawrence Green belies this prejudice and exposes it for what it is. Sampling and reading reams and reams of his writings convinces one that he was a major literary figure who deserves to be taught at higher institutions of learning. His neglect since his death nearly forty years ago is a disservice to South African literature. Although the brilliance of his style attains its utmost vivacity on matters concerning gastronomy, his descriptions of nature and the ocean are equally compelling. He was a poet of open spaces. Green was attracted to figures, in many instances men, who had chosen solitary existence in order to challenge their occupation, or lack of it, and nature in absolute solitude. His fascination with solitude was paradoxical in that in his existential experience he was very much a ‘family man’ who lived with a divorcee and her child (son) across thirty years of blissful joy travelling with her wherever he went. Her son who published a biography of Lawrence Green, Memories Of A Friendship (1973), reveals that it was his mother who demurred from many marriage proposals though she dearly loved him and was absolutely happy in the relationship. Although he was entranced by the open spaces of nature and wrote in a popular generic mode, the travelogues are filled with his visitations to the great museums of Europe and United States. For Green it would seem that the distinction between high culture and popular culture was meaningless, or at least as it impinged on his imagination and sensibility. John Yates-Benyon reveals in his biography that his ‘father’, for whom he had unending love and admiration, worshipped the Prado Museum in Madrid and his favorite painter was Velasquez. Green’s admiration for the Spanish painters was superseded only by that of the French Impressionists. This latter preference is confirmed by the many descriptive passages in quite substantial pages of his travelogues: in fact, could even argue that he was a writer in a literary mode. Although Green was first and foremost a travel writer, popular in the English-speaking world, particularly within the Commonwealth countries, he seems also to have written stories in an essayistic mode for magazines. There are diverse thematic patterns in many of his voluminous writings: the Karoo landscape which holds a deep fascination in the imagination of white South African writers from Olive Schreiner through Pauline Smith to J. M. Coetzee; the cultural horizon and situational context of the Bushmen (San people) in the Kalahari Desert without concerning himself unduly with its tragic political consequences; the world of the supernatural consisting of magicians, clairvoyants and people of dubious character but possessed of uncharacteristic imagination; perhaps no other South African writer has represented the complex nature of Cape Town with such singular intent and persistence as Lawrence Green across this three books about this beautiful city; his marvel at the splendor of nature as embodied in Orange River as it meanders through four hundred miles of South African territory towards the majestic Atlantic Ocean at Alexander Bay---a fascination to which he devoted a whole book; the meeting point between landscape, nature and ancestral people in forging a force field of metaphysical unities that defines the uniqueness of certain civilizations; the traditional hospitality of the Afrikaners who live in the countryside wholly devoted to a religious communion with the land; his unending fascination with C. Louis Leipoldt, medical doctor and towering Afrikaner writer, as an exemplary South African intellectual; a naturalist of sorts in his fascination, perhaps even obsession, with remote territories, islands and seas that present formidable obstacles to traverse; and lastly, prodigious research, which Green undertook in London and South African libraries, as a serious component of any serious travel writing and in the practice of being a naturalist. What is singularly disturbing about the writings of Lawrence Greene is the complete absence of any kind of politics, especially the politics of oppression, so characteristic of the country he so dearly loved during his lifetime. This by no means necessarily detracts from him being a great writer, a particular genius informed by his love of English-language literature from John Ruskin and Thomas Pringle through Emily Brontë and Thackeray to A. E. Housman quoted in epigraphic form in some of the title pages as well in chapters of his books. Before forgetting it should be mentioned that Green had an astonishing taste for first-rate wines.