Le Guin became popular and got good reviews quickly after publishing "The Left Hand of Darkness" in 1969. She was very well known among SF writers by the 1970s. Readers bought millions of her books. And, her writing was translated into more than 40 languages. Some of her books stayed in print many decades after their first publication. Academics studied her work carefully and discussed it often. Later in her career, mainstream literary critics wrote positively about her work. In an obituary, Jo Walton said that Le Guin "was so good that the mainstream couldn't dismiss SF any more".