The Quiet American (Penguin Classics)

"After dinner I sat and waited for Pyle in my room over the rue Catinat; he said, 'I'll be with you latest by ten,' and when midnight struck I couldn't stay quiet any longer and went down into the street..."

"I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused," Graham Greene's narrator Fowler remarks of Alden Pyle, the eponymous "Quiet American" of what is perhaps the most controversial novel of his career. Pyle is the brash young idealist sent out by Washington on a mysterious mission to Saigon, where the French Army struggles against the Vietminh guerrillas.

As young Pyle's well-intentioned policies blunder into bloodshed, Fowler, a seasoned and cynical British reporter, finds it impossible to stand safely aside as an observer. But Fowler's motives for intervening are suspect, both to the police and himself, for Pyle has stolen Fowler's beautiful Vietnamese mistress.

Originally published in 1956 and twice adapted to film, The Quiet American remains a terrifiying and prescient portrait of innocence at large. This Graham Greene Centennial Edition includes a new introductory essay by Robert Stone.

Robert Stone is the author of seven novels, including Dog Soldiers (1974), Damascus Gate (1998), and Bay of Souls (2003). He has also written short stories, essays, and screenplays, and published a short story collection, Bear and His Daughter, in 1997. Dog Soldiers won a National Book Award in 1975. Stone was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1937 and was raised in New York City. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1955–1958. He was for nine years at Yale as the Rosenkranz Writer in Residence.