A revised version of Bawer's dissertation was published under the same title in 1986. Reviewing the book in "The New Criterion", James Atlas called the "character analyses... shrewdly intuitive and sympathetic", found Bawer's "explanation for why the poets of the Middle Generation were so obsessed with [T.S.] Eliot especially persuasive", and described Bawer as "an impressive textual critic" with a "casual and self-assured" critical voice. In "Commonweal Magazine", Robert Phillips called Bawer "a critic of the first order, one of the best we have today". The book was named an Academic Book of the Year by the American Library Association.