In the first volume of his autobiography, A Sort of Life, Greene wrote that he was unsure if he would have traveled to Liberia if he had not read H. Rider Haggard, an English author of adventure fiction set in Africa and other exotic locales.

Looking over his supplies at the start of the journey, Greene admitted to feeling "a little shamed by my servants, who each brought with them a small flat suitcase.

"[1] Greene set off from the northernmost point of the country bordering Sierra Leone near the town of Kailahun (near Pendembu) and travelled in a south-easterly direction through the jungle highlands.

He crossed through a section of French Guinea, going between the Liberian towns of Zorzor and Ganta, before turning south-west and arriving at the coast at Grand Bassa.

In Paul Theroux's introduction to the 1981 version of Barbara's book, he says "Few journeys have been so well recorded, and there are few discrepancies and no contradictions between the two accounts".

[6] However, in Michael Shapiro's 2004 book A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk about Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration, he records Jonathan Raban saying Barbara's memoir "contradicts Greene's memoir on almost every point.. neither narrator agrees with the one other as to anything at all, where they were, who they saw, what they met, the condition of his illness, whatever.