The Quiet American
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First published in 1955, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is a tense, morally complex novel set in French-colonial Vietnam on the eve of the country’s struggle for independence. Thomas Fowler, a weary British journalist, watches the conflict unfold from Saigon, where his relationship with Phuong, a young Vietnamese woman, becomes entangled with the arrival of Alden Pyle, an earnest American whose idealism conceals a dangerous political naivety. As their personal rivalry deepens, Greene draws the reader into a world of covert operations, competing loyalties and the human cost of foreign intervention.
Part political thriller, part intimate study of jealousy, responsibility and belief, the novel questions the innocence of those who claim to act for the greater good. Greene’s own experience as a correspondent in Southeast Asia lends the story its unsettling immediacy, while its portrait of American intervention gives it a significance that extends far beyond its historical setting. Elegant, unsparing and deeply ambiguous, The Quiet American remains one of Greene’s most enduring explorations of the collision between private desire and political conviction.
From the book
“Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it.”
— Graham Greene, The Quiet American
On The Quiet American
“A brilliant and deeply disturbing novel.”
— The New York Times