The Quiet American

The Quiet American is a novel by the English writer Graham Greene, published in 1955 and set in Vietnam during the First Indochina War, as French colonial rule was coming to an end.

It is narrated by Thomas Fowler, a British journalist, and it takes place as French colonial rule is breaking down and American involvement in the country is beginning. Fowler introduces the reader to Alden Pyle, a young American who arrives with theories about how Vietnam ought to be rebuilt, and to Phuong, the Vietnamese woman Fowler loves. The novel is built around those three and around what Pyle's certainty costs the people near him.

Greene drew on his own time as a correspondent in French Indochina for The Times and Le Figaro between 1951 and 1954, and he finished the novel years before the American war that followed. He portrays Pyle as so convinced of his own country's good intentions that he cannot see the damage he does, and the book has drawn attention ever since for anticipating the course of American involvement in Vietnam.