J.R. Oppenheimer and H. Snyder’s 1939 paper On Continued Gravitational Contraction  is widely celebrated as pioneering on the history of black holes, with a thorough description of a gravitational collapse, including the loss of communication characteristic of the modern concept of black holes. This presentation is a historical reassessment of this status, considering Oppenheimer and Snyder’s influences, the novelty in their thinking, and the later impact of their work, focusing on the contribution given by cosmologists and relativists, and how the understanding of Schwarzschild gravitational field helped on the acceptance of the idea of gravitational collapse.