The novel was popular in England, and over the years achieved notable status. It was adapted to film in 1958, and again in 2002 by Miramax. The 2002 film featured Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, and earned Caine a Best Actor nomination.
When the novel was first published in the United States in 1956, however, it was widely condemned there as anti-American. For example, it was criticised in 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".[4]
The title of a 1958 book, The Ugly American, was a play on Greene's title; however, the authors of that book, Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, had arguably thoroughly misunderstood Greene’s novel, since their book argued that the American diplomatic corps needed to be more modern, technically proficient, and friendly in assisting Third World countries—some of the exact opinions that Greene had depicted as blinding Alden Pyle.[5]
French journalist Jean-Claude Pomonti's 2006 book about the South Vietnamese correspondent and Viet Cong spy Phạm Xuân Ẩn was titled Un Vietnamien bien tranquille (The Quiet Vietnamese), which was widely understood as a play on the title of Greene's book.[6]
Scott Anderson’s 2021 book, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War—A Tragedy in Three Parts, describes the activities of CIA operators during the Cold War. This book’s title too is a play on the title of Greene's book, although its spy craft-related themes are different.[7]
On November 5, 2019, the BBC News included The Quiet American on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.[8]
