Trivia

In a 2023 interview with Esquire, Cord Jefferson explained his approach to a key scene in the film and how the actors elevated it in unexpected ways: "We've all seen that scene of the writer pounding the keyboard frantically, then taking a big sip of coffee and getting back to it. That's how you depict somebody intensely writing. But I thought, 'We can't have that. It's tropey and silly, and it doesn't get the audience's minds going.' So why not have these characters manifest in front of him? When I wrote that scene, I wrote the language to be very silly. It had to be ridiculous so that everybody could see how stupid this book is and what a sham it is. Then we got Keith David and Okieriete Onaodowan, who are both such tremendous actors. All of the sudden, it wasn't silly anymore. They made it seem like the book might be good. I love what the scene became in their hands: suddenly you're questioning whether or not the book is good, which is evidence that something as ridiculous as this book could become a hit."

According to an interview in the Arizona Daily Star, most of the fictional book titles of the "Literary Award" finalists were the names of bands whose members screenwriter Cord Jefferson was friends with during middle school and high school in Tucson.

The photo Monk stares at in the stairway is from Doctors Kenneth and Mamie Clark's study "The Doll Test"; which was used in the Supreme Court case "Brown v. Board of Education" which ended school segregation. The photo was taken by Gordon Parks, one of the twentieth century's most celebrated photographers and one of the first Black photojournalists to be hired by predominantly white publications like Life Magazine and Glamour.

Monk's pseudonym, Stagg R. Lee, is a play on an early twentieth-century folk song that has been performed in various forms (and under various title spellings) by various artists. The song was based on the real-life story of an 1895 murder committed by Lee Shelton, a pimp from St. Louis, Missouri, who went by the nicknames of "Stag," "Stagolee," "Stack-O-Lee," or "Stagger Lee"; because of the widespread popularity of the song, the story of Shelton has developed into an often-admired and criticized stereotype of Black masculinity and criminality.

When Cord Jefferson sent the prospective screenplay out to film companies, it was under the more provocative title of "Fuck". While this is a plot point in the film, it was never going to go out to theaters with a title like that so it was changed to American Fiction (2023), albeit quite late in the day, just prior to its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.