The essays have two main sources:  the scholarship of Northrop Frye and the journalism of Norman Mailer.  Of Frye's scholarship, the chief books to influence A.J. have been The Secular Scripture, The Educated Imagination, The Critical Path, and Anatomy of Criticism.  The chief essays to influence A.J. from the work of Mailer have been The White Negro and Ten Thousand Words a Minute--also two books:  The Faith of Graffiti and The Armies of the Night.

Mailer's volatile temperament, his vengeful and humorous tactics to gain attention, and his fluid, masterly, metaphoric style are nothing if not entertaining.  To be more specific, A.J. spent a good year in the company of a collection of Mailer's writings entitled The Long Patrol, reading feverishly like an abandoned baby at a she-wolf's breast.  Confronted with Mailer's riotous personal life, A.J. sat in judgment, exalted to this position by being party to Mailer's unbridled panoply of penitent, exuberant, thrilling confessions of compromise, habit, mood-swing, and, let us not forget, courage.

A.J. sent a copy of one of his books to Mr. Mailer and received a personal thank-you note from Mailer himself, along with several copies of humorous sketches Mailer had drawn.  This response was not quite what Emerson's was to Whitman--"I greet you on the beginning of a great career"--yet A.J. appreciated it.  He counts himself as one of Mailer's own.

Northrop Frye's amazing erudition and unhurried, uncluttered, all-comprehensive prose have shambled through A.J.'s consciousness like a giant for over thirty years.  Back in the late seventies, A.J. wrote a master's thesis on Moby-Dick, using Frye's Secular Scripture and Anatomy of Criticism as a rubric for identifying generic characteristics of romance and tragedy in Melville's masterpiece.  But the task of writing a grammar of archetypal forms as suggested by books like The Secular Scripture and The Great Code, though A.J. contemplated undertaking such a task, never came to fruition in his hands.  Instead, A.J. sought to make Frye's mythological perspective come alive in the archetypal imagery and symbolism of A.J.'s own creative writing and scholarship.

A.J. had the opportunity to meet Frye in 1984. At a wine and cheese reception at the Library of Congress after a lecture Frye had given, A.J. introduced himself to Frye, shaking the scholar's hand emotionally and saying just as emotionally, "You are the Marx to my Ho Chi Minh." Adherence to ideals of a personal revolution that must have rivaled Ho Chi Minh's in intensity brought A.J., over twenty years later, to Portraits Deep in the Castle.