Summary and Response Paper
The Ugly American (1958), a novel written by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick, is based on the actual experiences and observations of the authors in Asia as employees of the U.S. Foreign Service. As such, it is vital to address two major questions: what makes The Ugly American ugly in the minds of Lederer and Burdick; and, do the authors have a point? The novel is a sequence of interrelated stories of actual individuals that Burdick, a scholar, and Lederer, a navy commander, met abroad in the midst of escalation to the Vietnam War. The novel takes place ...