One printing bears this accolade on the cover, from Graham Greene: "It is a rare pleasure to read an autobiography with a pattern and meaning valid for us all. "The Seven Storey Mountain" is a book one reads with a pencil so as to make it one's own." Evelyn Waugh also greatly (although not uncritically) admired the book and its author. He admired the book so much, he edited the autobiography for a British audience and published it as "Elected Silence".