Blackberry Winter first appeared in November of 1946 at a time when Warren's novel All the King's Men was on the New York Times best-seller list. Because of the success of the novel, Warren's agent was able to get him an unusually large amount of money for the publication of his novelette. When Warren collected his short fiction into the volume called The Circus in the Attic and Other Stories in 1948, he received what was for him an exceptionally large advance against royalties.

Early reviews praised the title story and Blackberry Winter (the second story in the book), but the critical consensus then and now is that the short story is not Warren's finest genre. Within a year of the book's publication, Warren told a colleague, "I know that the collection is, at the best, uneven, but if I was ever to publish them I reckoned I...