Winter in the Blood received warm praise from reviewers on publication. Reynolds Price, in a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review, was so impressed he argued that the novel should not be classified as an “Indian novel.” He described it instead as “a nearly flawless novel about human life.” Price commented on the way in which the narrator's life, so enclosed and self-defeating for most of the novel, was transformed at the end: “it opens onto light—and through natural, carefully prepared, but beautifully surprising narrative means: a recovery of the past; a venerable, maybe lovable, maybe usable past.” In Newsweek, Margo Jefferson described the novel as “beautiful and austere.” She commented that its “power lies in the individual scenes, with their spare dialogue and piercing detail, and in the atmosphere Welch ... creates.”

Winter in the Blood soon came to be considered a...