In 1950, Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer and poet Stephen Crane, whom he greatly admired. The book was followed by his next significant poem, "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" (1956), which featured illustrations by the artist Ben Shahn and was Berryman's first poem to receive "national attention" and a positive response from critics. Edmund Wilson wrote that it was "the most distinguished long poem by an American since T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"." When "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and Other Poems" was published in 1959, the poet Conrad Aiken praised the book's shorter poems, which he found superior to "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet".