was first published in 1955. The novel depicts growing American involvement in Vietnam in the 1950s during the First Indochina War between the French colonial power and the communist Viet Minh resistance. Greene portrays the well-meaning U.S. official Pyle, blinded by American exceptionalism and unaware of the calamities his actions bring upon the Vietnamese. The novel begins with Pyle's assassination and is told through the eyes of Thomas Fowler, a veteran British Journalist and opium addict, former lover of Pyle's Vietnamese mistress Phuong. The book correctly predicts subsequent American foreign policy and the outcome of the Vietnam War. It was twice adapted into film, in 1958 and 2002.

was an English writer, born in 1904, died 1991 in Vevey, Switzerland. He established his reputation with the novel Stamboul Train, which was made into the movie Orient Express. Greene became a Roman Catholic in 1926, influenced by his wife. In 1938 he went to Mexico to report on the persecution of Catholics in the aftermath of the Mexican revolution. A result was his novel The Power and the Glory. Greene resisted the lable of a 'catholic writer'. In 1940 he became literary editor of the Spectator. During the war he went to work for the British Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. He was twice shortlisted for the Nobel Prize. William Golding described Greene as "the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety."