The Temple of My Familiar is a unique novel, with few literary precedents.

Much like Lissie's dream familiar, it is not recognizably bird, fish, or reptile.

Nevertheless, Walker would claim to owe a debt to Zora Neale Hurston to whom she has often referred as her literary foremother. Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) is also concerned with the search for identity in an oppressive and exploitative world.

While both novels are concerned with the same struggle, however, the solutions are different. Hurston's character achieves her identity by adhering to her individual artistic vision, while Walker's characters achieve whole, healthy identities through participation in a community of people with a holistic vision of life.

The Temple of My Familiar has perhaps been most influenced by Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928). Walker quotes from the opening of Woolf's novel in an epigraph. Woolf's central character, Orlando, experiences life...