Appropriating Greene: Re-Reading The Quiet American and The End of the Affair

Abstract

In 1973, when the Collected Edition of Greene’s work was in the early stages of publication, Robert Murray Davis offered the following assessment of the writer’s transition ‘from standard to classic’: The continued respectful attitude towards Greene’s works stems from his contemporaneity, a journalistic virtue much admired by Peter Wolfe in his study of the entertainments and by reviewers more capable of dealing with newsworthiness than with art. This has been true of Greene’s reputation ever since he began to acquire one in the 1940s. The mixture of melodrama, theology, and what some called existentialism in novels like The Power and the Glory was one especially appealing to the readers and characteristic of the literature of the post-war decade.¹