Time wrote that Life Against Death was "largely ignored by both critics and the public". However, it added that following the publication of Love's Body, some important critics belatedly reviewed Life Against Death and The Observer placed it "on two outstanding-books lists." According to Time, there were more than fifty-thousand copies of Life Against Death in print as of 1966, and the book, like the sociologist David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) and the fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), had become "one of the underground books that undergraduates feel they must read to be with it". Time also described the book as "an undergraduate's delight".
