The work was originally published in The New Yorker,[1] which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article.[2] Less than two months later, the article was printed as a book by Alfred A. Knopf. Never out of print,[3] it has sold more than three million copies.[1][4] "Its story became a part of our ceaseless thinking about world wars and nuclear holocaust," New Yorker essayist Roger Angell wrote in 1995.[1]