Pirsig's work consists almost entirely of two novels. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sets out Pirsig's interpretation of "Quality" and "the Good." It is mostly a first person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris took from Minneapolis to San Francisco.
Pirsig's publisher's recommendation to his Board ended with "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature." Pirsig noted in an early interview, that Zen was rejected 121 times before being accepted by William Morrow Publishers. In his book review, George Steiner compared Pirsig's writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust, and Bergson, stating that "the assertion itself is valid... the analogies with Moby-Dick are patent". The Times Literary Supplement called it "Profoundly important, Disturbing, Deeply moving, Full of insights, A wonderful book".
In 1974, Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow him to write a follow-up, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), in which he elaborates and focuses on a value-based metaphysics, called Metaphysics of Quality, to replace the subject-object view of reality.