Hedayat's sister married Haj Ali Razmara who was an army general and among the prime ministers of Iran under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

[citation needed] Hedayat subsequently devoted his whole life to studying Western literature and to learning and investigating Iranian history and folklore.

The works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Anton Chekhov, and Guy de Maupassant intrigued him the most.

Hedayet spent time in Bombay learning the Pahlavi (Middle Persian) language from the Parsi Zoroastrian community of India.

In Bombay Hedayat completed and published his most enduring work, The Blind Owl, which he had started writing, in Paris, as early as 1930.

The book was praised by Henry Miller, André Breton, and others, and Kamran Sharareh has called it "one of the most important literary works in the Persian language".

On 9 April 1951, he plugged all the doors and windows of his rented apartment with cotton, then turned on the gas valve, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.