Saigon, early fifties, the French war going badly. Fowler is a British reporter, middle-aged, opium in the afternoons, living with a young Vietnamese woman named Phuong and determined to have no opinions about anything. Pyle is a young American just arrived, earnest, armed with a book about a Third Force that will save the country from both colonialism and communism. He takes Phuong, and he starts arranging things, and people die in a square in Saigon. Greene wrote it in 1955 and Americans hated it for a decade, at which point it began to look like reporting.
The Quiet American