Lennon's writing style is informed by his interest in English writer Lewis Carroll, while humorists Spike Milligan and "Professor" Stanley Unwin inspired his sense of humour.

Later commentators have discussed the book's prose in relation to Lennon's songwriting, both in how it differed from his contemporary writing and in how it anticipates his later work, heard in songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Am the Walrus".

[10] His childhood friend Pete Shotton remembered Lennon reciting the poem "at least a few hundred times", and that, "from a very early age, John's ultimate ambition was to one day 'write an Alice' himself".

[18] Made in the style of a newspaper, its cartoons and ads featured wordplay and gags,[24] such as a column reporting: "Our late editor is dead, he died of death, which killed him".

Lennon's friend and bandmate Paul McCartney also enjoyed Alice in Wonderland, The Goon Show and the works of Thurber, and the two soon bonded through their mutual interests and similar senses of humour.

He found hilarious one of Lennon's earliest poems, "The Tale of Hermit Fred", especially its final lines:[43]I peel the bagpipes for my wife And cut all negroes' hair As breathing is my very life And stop I do not dare.

Visiting Lennon's 251 Menlove Avenue home one day in July 1958, McCartney found him writing a poem and enjoyed the wordplay of lines like "a cup of teeth" and "in the early owls of the morecombe".

[18] Most of the written content was new,[18] but some had been done previously, including the stories "On Safairy with Whide Hunter" (1958), "Henry and Harry" (1959), "Liddypool" (1961 as "Around And About"), "No Flies on Frank" (1962) and "Randolf's Party" (1962), and the poem "I Remember Arnold" (1958),[59] which he wrote following the death of his mother, Julia.

[60] Lennon worked spontaneously and generally did not return to pieces after writing them, though he did revise "On Safairy with Whide Hunter" in mid-July 1962, adding a reference to the song "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", a hit in early 1962.

[102] Gloria Steinem opined in a December 1964 profile of Lennon for Cosmopolitan that the book showed him to be the only one of the band who had "signs of a talent outside the hothouse world of musical fadism and teenage worship".

[105] In a favourable review for The Nation, Peter Schickele drew comparison to Edward Lear, Carroll, Thurber and Joyce, adding that even those "with a predisposition toward the Beatles" will be "pleasantly shocked" when reading it.

[109][note 8] In an accompanying "translation" of his review, he predicted that while it would "[a]lmost certaintly ... be a best seller", it could lend itself to controversy, with newer Beatles fans likely to be "puzzled by its way-out, off beat and sometimes sick humour".

[110] On 19 June 1964, during a House of Commons debate on automation,[111] he quoted the poem "Deaf Ted, Danoota, (and me)", then spoke derisively about the book, arguing that Lennon's verse was a symptom of a poor education system.

[112] He suggested that Lennon was "in a pathetic state of near-literacy", adding that "[h]e seems to have picked up bits of Tennyson, Browning, and Robert Louis Stevenson while listening with one ear to the football results on the wireless.

[117] Professor of English Ian Marshall describes Lennon's prose as "mad wordplay", noting the Lewis Carroll influence and suggesting it anticipates the lyrics of later songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "I Am the Walrus".

[144] Both Everett and Beatles researcher Kevin Howlett discuss the influence of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass on both of Lennon's books and on the lyrics for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".

[164] He suggests that the lines "he was debb and duff and could not speeg"[165] and "Practice daily but not if you are Mutt and Jeff"[166] from the pieces "Sad Michael" and "All Abord Speeching", respectively, were influenced by a passage from Finnegans Wake discussing whether someone is deaf or deaf-mute, reading:[167]Jute.

[170] Gould comments that The Goon Show was Lennon's closest experience to the style of Finnegans Wake, and describes Milligan's 1959 book Silly Verse for Kids as "the direct antecedent to In His Own Write.

[170] Prone to hitting his girlfriends as a teenager,[176] Lennon also included several domestic violence allusions in the book, such as "No Flies on Frank", where a man beats his wife to death and then tries to deliver the corpse to his mother-in-law.

[36][117] Thelma Pickles, Lennon's girlfriend in the autumn of 1958,[180] later recalled he would joke with disabled people he encountered in public, including "[accosting] men in wheelchairs and [jeering], 'How did you lose your legs?

[185] One of the reviews of In His Own Write tried to put me in this satire boom with Peter Cook and those people that came out of [the University of] Cambridge, saying, "Well, he's just satirising the normal things, like the Church and the State," which is what I did.

"[189] Lennon and his best friend in art college, Stu Sutcliffe,[190] often discussed writers like Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac and other Beat poets, such as Gregory Corso and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

[195] Journalist Simon Warner disagrees, positing that Lennon's writing style owed little to the Beat movement, being instead largely derived from the nonsense tradition of the late nineteenth century.

[161] Journalist Scott Gutterman describes the characters as "strange, protoplasmic creatures",[198] and "lumpen everyman and everywoman figures" joined by animals, "[gamboling] around an empty landscape, engaged in obscure pursuits".

[199] Analysing the illustration accompanying the piece "Randolf's Party", Gutterman describes the group as "gossiping, frowning, and bunching together", but while some figures adhere to regular social conventions, some fly away out of the image.

[210] Prince Philip of the British royal family read the book and said he enjoyed it thoroughly,[83] while Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau described Lennon in 1969 as "a pretty good poet".

[234] On the day of photoshoot, Aldridge changed his mind and instead had Lennon dress as the comic book character Superman, with the imagery meant to suggest he had now conquered music, film and literature.

DC Comics, the owners of the Superman franchise, claimed the image infringed on their copyright, so Aldridge retouched the photo, replacing the S on the costume's shield with Lennon's initials.

[83] Authors Christiane Rochefort and Rachel Mizraki translated the book into French,[236] published in 1965 as En flagrant délire[237] with a new humorous preface titled "Intraduction [sic] des traditrices".

[283] Ono biographer Jerry Hopkins suggests the couple's first experiment with heroin in July 1968 was in part due to the pain they experienced from their treatment by the press,[289] an opinion Beatles writer Joe Goodden shares, though he writes that they first used the drug together in May 1968.