Steven Millhauser's most immediate precedents include the short fiction of Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover. These authors also create a fun-house world of play and illusion; the stories in The Barnum Museum are clearly heirs. For example, Robert Coover's short story "The Babysitter" offers an account—or, rather, several conflicting, simultaneous accounts—of what happens to a babysitter and her charges over the course of an evening. This story, too, shows the impossibility of interpretation and of ever getting to the truth.

However, Millhauser's precedents go further back than the American postmodern writers of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of the same themes may be seen in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne, particularly in "Rappaccini's Daughter." Rappaccini's overwhelming desire for knowledge, and his use of that knowledge to tamper with nature, is echoed in "The Invention of Robert Herendeen," as is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein...