Both the author of Ship of Fools, Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980), and the director and producer of the novel's film adaptation, Stanley Kramer, had grand expectations for their works. Porter envisioned her novel (the only one she published) as her crowning achievement, the work that would finally put to rest the carping critics who had dismissed her as “merely” a writer of short stories. Ship of Fools, moreover, would be the fullest expression of the major themes and issues that she had been exploring all along in her short stories, her culminating statement on life in the twentieth century, and, more generally, on the human condition. As the centerpiece of her career, the novel would look both backward to her previous work and forward to posterity.

Kramer, likewise, had high hopes for his film. As he recalled in his autobiography, he read Ship of Fools not long after its publication in 1962 and was immediately struck by its potential as a motion picture, observing that while reading the novel “ideas for filming kept flooding into my head. The characters, the subcharacters, the mature but tragic love story, all appealed to me. And the technique of telling the stories with a narrator who would function like a Greek chorus occurred to me in what I thought was a brilliant flash.”