Literary Significance and Reception
After its publication in the U.S. in 1956, the novel was widely condemned as anti-American. It was criticized by The New Yorker for portraying Americans as murderers, largely based on one scene in which a bomb explodes in a crowd of people. According to critic Philip Stratford, “American readers were incensed, perhaps not so much because of the biased portrait of obtuse and destructive American innocence and idealism in Alden Pyle, but because in this case it was drawn with such acid pleasure by a middle-class English snob like Thomas Fowler whom they were all too ready to identify with Greene himself”. However, it was popular in England and over the years has achieved notable status, being adapted into films in 1958 and most recently in 2002 by Miramax, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser and earning the former a Best Actor nomination.
Read more about this topic: The Quiet American
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or reception:
“I am not a literary man.... I am a man of science, and I am interested in that branch of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech.”
—J.A.H. (James Augustus Henry)
“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)