In 1986, Lord authored his follow-up book, The Night Lives On, following renewed interest in the story after the wreck of the Titanic was discovered by Robert Ballard.

[3] A Night to Remember was only Lord's second book but was a huge success, thanks in no small part to the aggressive advertising campaign carried out by R & W Holt following its launch in November 1955.

Daniel Allen Butler comments that "although it was of immense interest to Titanic buffs the world over, it lacked the spark of the original,"[3] which by 1998 had reached its fiftieth printing.

"[6] The secret to Lord's success, according to the New York Herald Tribune's critic Stanley Walker, was that he used "a kind of literary pointillism, the arrangement of contrasting bits of fact and emotion in such a fashion that a vividly real impression of an event is conveyed to the reader.

Nathaniel Philbrick, writing in the introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of A Night to Remember, notes that at the time of publication it was the first significant book about Titanic for nearly forty years.

He argues that the book's hallmarks are its restraint, brevity and readability, which downplays the extravagant and mythical aspects of the disaster and instead puts in the foreground the stories of the people on the ship.

[7] It tells the story in a highly visual and aural way, describing the sights and sounds of the night of the disaster "with the immediacy of a live broadcast or a television documentary", as Biel puts it.

"[10] The significance of Lord's book, according to Biel, is that it "gave the disaster its fullest retelling since 1912 and made it speak to a modern mass audience and a new set of postwar concerns.

[12] The University of California sociologist Fred Davis comments that nostalgia "thrives ... on the rude transitions wrought by such phenomena as war, depression, civil disturbance, and cataclysmic natural disasters – in short, those events that cause masses of people to feel uneasy and to wonder whether the world and their being are quite what they always took them to be.

"[13] The turmoil and uncertainty of the early Atomic Age and the onset of profound social changes made the old concepts of the nuclear family and traditional gender roles, reflected in the behaviour of Titanic's passengers, resonate with a mid-1950s audience.

[16] It has been described as "the biggest, most lavish, most expensive thing of its kind" attempted up to that point, with 31 sets, 107 actors, 72 speaking parts, 3,000 gallons of water and costing $95,000 ($1,064,651.2 at present-day prices).

Rains' narration was used "to bridge the almost limitless number of sequences of life aboard the doomed liner", as a reviewer put it,[18] and closed with his declaration that "never again has Man been so confident.

Its conclusion reflects Lord's world-historical theme of a "world changed for ever" with a fictional conversation between Lightoller and Colonel Archibald Gracie, sitting on a lifeboat.

After Lord died in 2002, he bequeathed to the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England his huge collection of manuscripts, original letters and Titanic memorabilia, which he had gathered during his life and used to write A Night to Remember.