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Books Like The Quiet American
What to read after The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Graham Greene's The Quiet American (1955) is a masterwork of political fiction — Fowler's weary moral pragmatism against Pyle's dangerous innocent certainty, with 1950s Saigon as the backdrop. Still the most prescient literary critique of American interventionism in Southeast Asia, and a perfect miniature of what Greene does at his best. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
A whisky priest in Mexico during the Cristero War — Greene's most fully realized novel and the one he himself considered his best; where The Quiet American is about political innocence and its consequences, The Power and the Glory is about spiritual failure and its unexpected redemptions; the two novels are the poles of Greene's achievement
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The Third Man
by Graham Greene
Holly Martins in postwar Vienna looking for his friend Harry Lime — originally written as a novella for the Carol Reed film; the most successful of Greene's entertainments; shorter than The Quiet American but in the same register: a man who discovers his friend is not who he thought, in a morally ruined city
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The Sympathizer
by Viet Thanh Nguyen
A communist spy in the South Vietnamese army — the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that is the essential companion to The Quiet American: where Greene gives you Vietnam from the British journalist's perspective, Nguyen gives you the same war from the Vietnamese communist spy's perspective; together the two novels give you the full political range of what the conflict meant to those who lived it
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Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad is Greene's great predecessor in the literature of moral failure and colonial guilt; Lord Jim asks the same questions as The Quiet American — what happens when a man's self-image is shattered by a moment of cowardice, and can he redeem himself? — in the same Southeast Asian colonial world, but fifty years earlier
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The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene
Scobie, a British police officer in wartime West Africa, whose sense of pity leads him into a series of moral compromises that end in disaster — Greene's most fully Catholic novel and the companion to The Quiet American in its portrait of a good man destroyed by the gap between his values and the world he operates in
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Matterhorn
by Karl Marlantes
A Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam — the military novel of the same war that The Quiet American anticipates; where Greene shows the diplomatic and intelligence world that led to American intervention, Marlantes shows what that intervention looked like in the jungle, fifteen years later; together the two books give you the full arc of American involvement in Indochina
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A Burnt-Out Case
by Graham Greene
An architect who has lost his faith and his capacity for feeling, retreating to a Congo leper colony — Greene's most autobiographical novel and the one most directly about the experience of spiritual and creative exhaustion; the natural companion to The Quiet American for readers who want to go deeper into Greene's Catholic existentialism
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The Ugly American
by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick
An American diplomat and a series of American aid workers in a fictional Southeast Asian country in the 1950s — published three years after The Quiet American, in 1958; where Greene's novel is a literary work, The Ugly American is a political polemic in novel form; both are critiques of American foreign policy in Asia, and both influenced John F. Kennedy
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