Of the characters in A Fine and Private Place, Beagle wrote in his introduction to The Fantasy Worlds of Peter S. Beagle that "Mr. Rebeck is a flagrant steal from the Robert Nathan novels that I was devouring at the time, most particularly One More Spring, (1933).

Michael Morgan was my idea of what being all of thirty-four and unhappily but interestingly married would be like; Laura Durand is me then; and Mrs. Gertrude Klapper, thank God, is herself." The four main characters do not function as separate entities. Instead, they form a complex pattern of foils in which each character complements the other three. Thus Michael Morgan is a ghost who invests all of his mental faculties into remembering past sensations; he desperately wants to hang on to life and to motivate Laura, who only wants to sleep underground, to do the same. He is therefore not only...