Following the publication of Tintin in the Congo, Hergé researched a story set in the United States, desiring to reflect his concerns regarding the treatment of American Indian communities by the U.S. government.

In 1945, Tintin in America was re-drawn and colored in Hergé's ligne-claire style for republication by Casterman, with further alterations made at the request of his American publisher for a 1973 edition.

The critical reception of the work has been mixed, with commentators on The Adventures of Tintin arguing that although it represents an improvement on the preceding two installments, it still reflects many of the problems that were visible in them.

In 1932, Tintin, a reporter for Le Petit Vingtième, goes with his dog Snowy on an assignment to Chicago, Illinois, to fight against the city's organised crime syndicate.

Tintin evades a lynch mob and a wildfire before coming across train tracks which he decides to follow in order to get back to civilization and continue on Smiles' trail.

However, the train happens to stop right before running him over and he is safely rescued, allowing him to continue on his search and find Smiles' remote hideaway cabin.

Run by the Abbé Norbert Wallez, the paper described itself as a "Catholic Newspaper for Doctrine and Information" and disseminated a far-right, fascist viewpoint.

Having been fascinated with the outdoor world of Scouting and the way of life he called "Red Indians" since boyhood, Hergé wanted to set Tintin's first adventure among the Native Americans in the United States.

[14] To learn more about Native Americans, Hergé read Paul Coze and René Thévenin's 1928 book Mœurs et histoire des Indiens Peaux-Rouges ("Customs and History of the Redskin Indians")[15] and visited Brussels' ethnographic museum.

Written in the context of the Wall Street crash of 1929, Duhamel's work contained strong anti-consumerist and anti-modernist sentiment, criticising the U.S.'s increased mechanisation and standardisation from a background of European conservatism; this would have resonated with both Wallez and Hergé's viewpoints.

[19] Hergé used its images of skyscrapers as a basis for his depiction of Chicago and adopted its account of Native Americans being evicted from their land when oil was discovered there.

[21] Blanchard's article discussed the gangster George Moran, whom literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès believed provided the basis for the character Bobby Smiles.

[25] Despite his extensive research into American life, Hergé accidentally drew steering wheels on the right side of cars in some panels of the comic.

[26] It has been suggested that strongman Arthur Saxon, who died a decade prior to serialization of Tintin in America, may have influenced the character Billy Bolivar.

The use of "Chicago" over "America" reflected Wallez's desire for the story to focus on a critique of American capitalism and crime, for which the city was internationally renowned.

For instance, Monsieur Tom Hawke, whose name was a pun on tomahawk, was renamed Mr. Maurice Oyle, and the Swift factory was renamed Grynd Corp.[44] Other changes were made to render the story more culturally understandable to an Anglophone readership; whereas the factory originally sold its mix of dogs, cats, and rats as hare pâté—a food uncommon in Britain—the English translation rendered the mix as salami.

[45] Although Tintin in America and much of Hergé's earlier work displayed anti-American sentiment, he later grew more favourable to American culture, befriending one of the country's most prominent artists, Andy Warhol.

With a letter of recommendation from his friend Father Gall, he was invited to indulge his childhood desire to meet with real "Red Indians"—members of the Oglala Lakota on their Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota—and take part in a pow wow.

[50] They considered Bobby Smiles to be "the first great villain" of the series,[25] and also thought that Mike MacAdam, the incompetent hotel detective featured in the comic, was a precursor to Thomson and Thompson, while another character, the drunken sheriff, anticipated Captain Haddock.

[52] Thompson also opined that the book's "highlight" was on page 29 of the 1945 version, in which oil is discovered on Native land, following which they are cleared off by the U.S. Army, and a complete city is constructed on the site within 24 hours.

[52] Biographer Benoît Peeters praised the strip's illustrations, feeling that they exhibited "a quality of lightness" and showed that Hergé was fascinated by the United States despite the anti-Americanism of his milieu.

Hergé biographer Pierre Assouline believed Tintin in America to be "more developed and detailed" than the prior Adventures,[23] representing the cartoonist's "greatest success" in a "long time".

[10] Such directional problems were also criticized by Michael Farr,[20] who nevertheless thought the story "action-packed", with a more developed sense of satire and therefore greater depth than Soviets or Congo.

[34] He considered the depiction of Tintin climbing along the ledge of the skyscraper on page 10 to be "one of the most remarkable" illustrations in the entire series, inducing a sense of vertigo in the reader.

[20] Literary critic Jean-Marie Apostolidès of Stanford University thought that in Tintin in America, Hergé had intentionally depicted the wealthy industrialists as being very similar to the gangsters.

[22] Another literary critic, Tom McCarthy, concurred, believing that Tintin in America exhibited Hergé's "left-wing counter tendency" through attacking the racism and capitalist mass production of the U.S.[58] McCarthy believed that the work exposed social and political process as a "mere charade", much as Hergé had previously done in Tintin in the Land of the Soviets.

The ending of the story also rewritten; in the book, Tintin returns safely to Europe, however, in the televised episode, he receives a phone call about the unknown situation and leaves his hotel room to solve it.

In 2002, French artist Jochen Gerner published a socio-political satire based on Tintin in America titled TNT en Amérique.

[62] When interviewed as to this project, Gerner stated that his pervasive use of black was a reference to "the censure, to the night, the obscurity (the evil), the mystery of things not entirely revealed".