[2][3] Originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction,[4][5][6] it was then printed in Rebels in Hell[7] before being incorporated into Silverberg's novel To the Land of the Living.

Real-life writers Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft feature as characters in the novella.

Robert Silverberg wrote that he was "drawn into" writing a story for the "Heroes in Hell" project.

While he remembered that the central concept of the series was "never clearly explained" to him, he noted the similarity of "Heroes in Hell" to Philip José Farmer's Riverworld works, and decided "to run my own variant on what Farmer had done a couple of decades earlier."

[8] To the Land of the Living was published in the British market in 1989 and reprinted in an American edition in 1990.