[6] In his 1994 autobiography The History of The Ginger Man, Donleavy wrote, "I smashed my fist upon its green cover format, published as it was in the pseudonymous and pornographic Traveller's Companion Series, and I declared aloud, 'If it's the last thing I ever do, I will avenge this book.

[9] In 1958, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, noted in The New York Times that, "In recent months a large number of remarkably accomplished first novels by Americans have appeared, all of them bearing the usual exclamations of enthusiasm from the publishers on their dust jackets.

[…] What really makes The Ginger Man a vital work is the fact that it both reflects and comments dramatically on the absurdities of an age clinging to values in which it simply cannot believe and unable to summon up the courage to find out what its moral convictions really are".

[10] Writing in The Guardian in 2004, James Campbell judged that, "The Ginger Man still reads well today, once one becomes accustomed to its headlong rush of style, its frequent verbless sentences, the switch of tenses and the manic swing between first and third persons as it lunges to catch the protagonist's babbling thoughts […] In other places, the prose hops along alliteratively, with hints of Joyce and Dylan Thomas.

[4] In the 2010 reissue of The Ginger Man, Jay McInerney noted in the introduction that the book "has undoubtedly launched thousands of benders, but it has also inspired scores of writers with its vivid and visceral narrative voice and the sheer poetry of its prose".

[6] Donleavy wrote a stage adaptation of The Ginger Man, directed by Philip Wiseman, which opened in London in September 1959, with Richard Harris playing Dangerfield.

The BBC produced a 90-minute made-for-television version of the play, directed by Peter Dews, and aired on 23 March 1962 in the United Kingdom.

[19] The book also inspired songs of the same name, the first recorded by Geoff Muldaur, Fritz Richmond, and John Sebastian on the 1964 Elektra The Blues Project (EKL-264).