Sādeq Hedāyat's Buf-e Kur appeared in Roget Lescot's French translation as La Chouette aveugle in 19532 and as The Blind Owl in D.P. Costello's English translation in 1957. A German translation by Heshmat Moayyad called Die blinde Eule appeared in 1960. The Persian original had first appeared in early 1937 in a limited edition of fifty copies which the author produced in Bombay from a handwritten mimeograph stencil. In late 1941, Buf-e Kur appeared in serialized form in a Tehrān daily called Irān. At the end of that year, it appeared in book form in Tehrān, and has been much reprinted since.

The best-known twentieth-century Persian book in Iran, The Blind Owl was the first twentieth-century Persian narrative to appear in French and English translations and the only such narrative marketed in America by a commercial publisher. It remains the only Iranian Persian novel readily available to the general English-speaking reading public and one of only a handful of Persian fictions readily available to French-speaking readers.

Critical writing in English on The Blind Owl's author Sādeq Hedāyat (1903-1951) exceeds that on the subject of any other twentieth-century Iranian author. Hedāyat receives exclusive attention in scores of publications. A Saturday Review piece by William Kay Archer in December 1958 first drew attention to the then just published Costello translation of The Blind Owl. Eight years later appeared the first relatively lengthy study of Hedāyat in English: the second half of Hasan Kamshad's Modern Persian Prose Literature (1966). Hedayat's ‘The Blind Owl’ Forty Years After (1978) used Kamshad's study as a springboard to a multifaceted examination of Hedāyat's book in a dozen essays by different writers.

Michael Beard's Hedayat's The Blind Owl as a Western Novel (1990) definitively (but not exhaustively) treats the subject of certain and possible European and American sources of inspiration for Hedāyat in The Blind Owl. M.A. Homayoun Katouzian's Sadeq Hedayat: The Life and Literature of an Iranian Writer (1991) presents a biographically oriented appreciation of Hedayat's writings, The Blind Owl seen as his major “psychofiction.”