It received critical acclaim upon its publication, not commercial success, but it did lead the way for support of the author’s further work through fellowships.

Goyen began to sketch parts of the novel during World War II, when he served on the aircraft carrier USS Casablanca.

[3] Publications of several short stories followed, and Goyen was awarded the Southwest Review Literary Fellowship in 1949, which supported his continuing work on the book.

and I must shape that and I must write about them—"The House of Breath".Alternate titles Goyen considered were Cries Down a Well, Six Elegies, and Six American Portraits.

The first is from a character in the book, Aunt Malley Ganchion: “What kin are we all to each other, anyway?” The second is the famous quote from French poet Rimbaud: “JE est un autre.”[citation needed] Literally translated, it means “I is another.” Goyen scholar Reginald Gibbons noted this “has the effect of alerting the reader in advance to the multiplicity of selves who narrate the book, all of them also in some sense the author-narrator “Goyen.””[5] Davis interprets both thus:[6] Kinship juxtaposed to otherness.

And so the capitalized and insistent "I" (JE) calls out its strangeness, a sense of distance already implied in the shadow of the porch, the precarious umbrella, already waiting in kinship, its shadowy trace.The book is narrated by several people, most notably a man returning after a long absence to his abandoned family home in Charity, Texas; other characters in the man’s family narrate their own sections, as do inanimate objects (a river, the wind, the woods).

The text does not adhere to the usual structure of a novel: there is no “plot” to develop, and characters and events are explored deeply as moments of life are recalled.

“The focus of the novel is the leaving and returning of the self-exiled “children” of Charity—the interrelatedness of people and place.”[7] Primary themes of the book include family (kinship), time, memory, sexuality, place and the identity it brings, and the Christ figure.

He would later recall that he felt that “everyone he met in the literary world wanted a piece of him, wanted to admire him as the moment’s fashion, and yet at the same time he felt that others were angry at him for his moment of public recognition.”[1] He would also recall later that he was “just about disinherited” by his family after the book’s publication, and “fell out of favor with many people” in his home town.

[10][15] Various critics and reviewers have called the style that the book is written in as abstract, psychological, lyrical, poetic, surreal, experimental, mythic, and fantastic.

Eliot's The Waste Land) and Elizabeth Schnack and in France by Maurice Edgar Coindreau (William Faulkner's translator).

[2] In 1975 in the U.S., the book was reprinted as a Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition, with a brief introductory note from the author, and “with changes that downplayed the novel’s erotic charge.”[9] In 2000, TriQuarterly Books (Northwestern University Press) printed the original version, as a Fiftieth Anniversary Edition, with an afterword by Reginald Gibbons, former editor of TriQuarterly magazine and Goyen scholar.

Trinity Square Repertory Company (Providence, Rhode Island) staged this adaptation, in which three characters were duplicated by black and white actors.