Robert Indiana kept a series of illustrated journals during the late 1950s and 1960s, in which he discusses the development of his work as well as his daily life on Coenties Slip.

Indiana's journal page for May 4, 1962, is dominated by a sketch of The Black Diamond American Dream #2. Regarding the work he records that the theme of the American Dream is not exhausted in his painting at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (The American Dream, I), and that he holds the theme "fertile enough for probably several different explorations." He goes on to write that "this one was brought into immediate being via [the] impetus of [the] black diamond polygons, which have a graphic crispness I am particularly fond of."