The book was a modest success at its publication, attracting readers with its message of environmentalism and simple living and its mystical Native American theme. It became a bigger popular success when the University of New Mexico Press reissued it in paperback, and saw another resurgence in interest in 1991, entering the "New York Times" Best Seller list and receiving the first ever American Booksellers Association Book of the Year (ABBY) award. It also became the subject of controversy the same year when historian Dan T. Carter definitively demonstrated that Forrest Carter was Asa Earl Carter, spurring several additional investigations into his biography. It was revealed that he had been a Ku Klux Klan member and segregationist political figure in Alabama who wrote speeches for George Wallace. Family members of Carter's claim that he did have Cherokee ancestry on his maternal grandparents' side.