Kingston finished writing The Woman Warrior during her seventeen-year stay in Hawaii. At the same time that she was working on The Woman Warrior, she was also writing China Men. She told Timothy Pfaff of the New York Times Book Review that she thinks of the two books as "one big book.

I was writing them more or less simultaneously." She hesitated to send The Woman Warrior to publishers, however, because she did not know what they would think of it. While publishers seldom print a writer's first attempt, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., took a chance on Kingston and her book's unusual style and content. The company published The Woman Warrior in 1976 as nonfiction. Surprisingly, the public liked the book so much, it promptly made the bestseller list. It also earned the National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction that year and held the honor of...