"In Our Time" was ignored and forgotten by literary critics for decades. Benson attributes the neglect to various factors. "The Sun Also Rises", published the next year, is considered the more important book followed fairly rapidly by the popular "A Farewell to Arms" two years after in 1928; critics' general assumption seemed to be that Hemingway's talent lay in writing prose rather than "sophisticated, complex design"; and "In Our Time" stories were combined with subsequent collections in the publication of "The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories" in 1938, drawing the critics' attention away from the book as an entity, toward the individual stories. In 1962, when Scribner's released the paperback edition of "In Our Time", it began to be taught in American universities, and by the end of the decade, the first critical study of the collection appeared. Benson describes the collection as the author's first "major achievement"; Wagner-Martin as "his most striking work, both in terms of personal involvement and technical innovation."