[In the following essay, Haslam offers an account of Saroyan's rise to fame in the 1930s and 1940s, highlighting the significance of California and the Fresno area as important settings in and literary influences on his fiction.]

First the terrain: not flat, but swooping, swerving, leading the eye first skyward where gulls seemed to hang, then down toward the bay or the vast Pacific, then up once more toward hills where the rich lived.

And the fog: On the coast, it was fluffy and damp and it visited much of summer—unlike the frigid miasma that burdened Fresno each winter. The young writer wore a sweater during June, July, and August, the searing season in his native Fresno.

And the people: his hometown was hardly as homogeneous as outsiders might imagine, but San Francisco was a world capital where turbanned Sikhs might rub elbows with Filipinos as they passed White Russians, a social stew that seemed exactly correct for a young artist.

In a sense, though, William Saroyan wasn't a newcomer at all when he arrived in the Bay Area as an adult. He had spent formative years, 1911 to 1916, in the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland. For a three- to eight-year-old, a boy who'd lost his father and who'd see his mother only on weekends, that period must have been both interminable and, in the deepest sense, shaping. There he would grow up in a multicultural atmosphere where he experienced America's cultural richness in a manner that probably would not have been replicable had he spent those years in Fresno; there he would learn how to attract attention to himself in a crowd; there he would manage occasional “escapes” that allowed him to sample the nearby city.

Willie's best friends at the Oakland facility were a Jewish boy and an Irish boy—this at a time when they were not seen merely as three white kids, but as three ethnic outsiders. He was a popular young rogue at the orphanage, a lad who had learned to cope with reality. When contemporary readers encounter, for instance, the exuberant young Aram Garoghlanian in “One of Our Future Poets, You Might Say,” they are encountering a character profoundly shaped by experiences in the Fred Finch Orphanage.

Saroyan's family was finally reunited and returned to Fresno in 1916. At what price the future author had coped, however, remains an open question. Many years later, he wrote about the day his mother had left him, a three-year-old, at the orphanage: “I began to cry and she said: ‘No, you are a man now, and men do not cry.’ So I stopped crying.” Aram Saroyan, William's son, has suggested that his father “froze” himself emotionally during those years in order to deal with the anguish he felt following his own father's death and his separation from his mother. “The grief that wasn't released here in the process of redirecting its energy to check the tears might now be said to be contained in the body more or less ‘on ice.’”¹ Aram further suggests that the damage done then contributed to both Saroyan's remarkable literature and his flawed parenting.

Certainly it toughened him in some ways and prepared him for the difficult role allowed an Armenian American boy—member of a repressed minority—in Fresno during those years. Richard Rodriguez has pointed out that “Immigrant Americans put up with the tenements and sweatshops and stoop labor not in resignation to tragedy but in the name of the future (‘Something better for my kids’).”² and that America has become a more productive, more dynamic land as a result.

In a sense, all immigrants are orphans—estranged from their parent countries—and certainly Saroyan's stint at the Oakland facility contributed to the perceptions and energy that would later define his work when he—a native-born Californian—became the first great immigrant voice from a state energized by transplants.

Early in 1919, William Saroyan returned to Bay Area terrain, Bay Area fog, Bay Area people, bringing his hope and his ambition. He had just experienced a frustrating if educational stint in New York City. He lived in San Francisco with his mother Takoohi, his brother Henry, and his sister Cosette, and he dedicated most of his time to writing, holding only part-time and often short-lived jobs. An inveterate gambler, Saroyan would bet anyone on virtually anything. His younger cousin, Archie Minasian, recalls that they'd walk over to Breen's Rummy Parlor, and Willie would ask,

“‘Arch, how much have you got?’

“‘I've got seven cents. …’

“‘Let me have it.’

“Mind you, seven cents. He's got fifteen cents.

“He'd sit in a penny game. Half an hour later, he's in a nickel game.”³

His gambling didn't endear him to his mother, brother, or sister, and it would eventually cause him big trouble indeed, but it did expose him to people he would later convert into characters in some of his tales. He didn't spend all his time gambling, of course; he also wrote, he also read, he also thought. He spent many hours in the Public Library. Among other things, he investigated volumes of Best American Short Stories to learn what he could about the how of writing good fiction.

Saroyan was not the product of formal education or specialized training. He learned how to write fiction by reading fiction, just as he learned how to live life by living it. During that brief stint in New York City in 1928, for instance, he didn't crack the literary world (let alone set it on fire), but he had many adventures and he observed many characters. Later those things—like nearly everything else he experienced—became material for his writing.

Back in San Francisco, reading everything from classics to contemporary experiments, he somehow learned to bend and expand literary possibilities, and to work against critical expectations: He was not proletarian; he was not trendy; he was not dull.

Most of all, he learned to trust his own instincts. For instance, Willie composed all twenty-six of the stories that appeared in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze in only thirty-three days; writing, in fact, became his way of perceiving the world: “I don't know which one [story] to think about at the end of my day's writing, and therefore, I think of none of them consciously, but allow them to just be there as I take my walk or eat or visit or just sleep.”⁴

As his award-winning play The Time of Your Life demonstrated, the Fresnan seemed to be able to glance into his own unique soul—a soul forged far from the nation's cultural mainstream—and to write with perspectives that seemed at once zany and true. If he never fully connected with San Francisco, he did mature as a writer there; it was a cosmopolitan arena where fledgling writers were expected, not merely tolerated.

Saroyan was always an outsider, but not a negative one. He hadn't been part of Fresno's mainstream either, so he easily slid between niches in the Bay City's churning society with its larger, more diverse cast of characters and less provincial values. The emerging artist quickly recognized that he need not imitate others because his own places and experiences were unique—few had written so well of California's poor and working-class population. No one had so effectively employed Central Valley settings and topics. He, along with his various communities, became the stuff of his work, and the cacophony of languages that he had heard in his life elements of his unique writing style.

Most of all, he came to understand the ephemerality of life. He would write in the preface of his first book, “Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.” This would be the enduring theme of his finest writing in the years that followed.

A family connection eventually opened the door for the novice. Saroyan's uncle Aram, a prominent attorney in Fresno, hosted Bostonian Armen Bardizian, an editor of Hairenik, the Armenian-language newspaper that had been founded in 1899. He invited the young man to contribute English-language pieces to the paper to help attract second-generation readers. As Saroyan remembered it, his uncle said to Bardizian, “Here's my nephew Willie, the crazy son of the Saroyans, and the Lord forgive them for begetting such a son. Only crazy boys try to be writers.”⁵

The opportunistic Willie immediately began submitting material, first a few nondescript poems, then the lode was revealed: “A Fist Fight for Armenia,” “The Broken Wheel,” and “The Barber's Apprentice,” all published in 1933 using the nom de plume Sirak Goryan, the name of a fifth-century Armenian writer. Saroyan considered the works essays, but the editors called them stories, and forever after his “stories” would dance on the boundary between fiction and nonfiction. Those and scores of others would later be collected in My Name Is Saroyan, an assemblage of his Hairenik pieces edited by James Tashjian in 1983.

A gambler as a writer too, young Saroyan submitted an experimental piece, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” to Martha Foley and Whit Burnett at Story magazine. Those editors immediately comprehended that they had encountered a special talent. The story was published in the February 1934 issue. As Howard Floan explains, the editors “had never known a more instantaneous, enthusiastic response to a new author.” The next April Story published “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” and the editors reported, “If the reception of his first story brought him dozens of letters of appreciation from other writers, ‘Seventy Thousand Assyrians’ last month won him a general public.”⁶

Soon his work appeared in The New Republic, The Yale Review, Scribner's, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Scholastic, and The American Mercury. “The Broken Wheel” was selected for Best American Short Stories of 1934. By October of that year, Random House was able to release The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, a collection of twenty-six short pieces that became a surprise best-seller. In a matter of months, he had gone from being Takoohi Saroyan's crazy son to one of America's most celebrated authors, an ascent very nearly unprecedented in American letters.

Why? Well, he was an American original, one buoyed by American possibilities yet layered by immigrant sadness. Hope was his message, but death was his companion, hovering always behind his chuckles and nudges. “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” for instance, remains a remarkable tale that plays against the literary paradigm of that period. The story that followed it, “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” was radically different in tone, style, and content, yet nearly as successful.

The young author seemed always to challenge the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, between what's literary and what's not. Moreover, just as he was creating literature, he was creating himself. In the preface to his play Sam's Ego House, he revealed something of the living fiction of his own life:

Everything I write, everything I have written, is allegorical. This came to pass inevitably. One does not choose to write allegorically any more than one chooses to grow black hair on his head. The stories of Armenia, Kurdistan, Georgia, Persia, Syria, Arabia, Turkey, and Israel are all allegorical, and apart from the fact that I heard these stories … I myself am a product of Asia Minor, hence the allegorical and the real are closely related in my mind.

In fact, all reality to me is allegorical, and I cannot so much as hear a commonplace American joke and not know and enjoy its deeper humor and meaning.

(p. xx)⁷

How was this Fresno-born author a product of Asia Minor? The only Saroyan child born in the United States, Willie explained to Michael Arlen, “An Armenian can never not be an Armenian.” His family had fled Turkish Armenia, and he could never ignore his people's tragic history, no matter where and what he was; it would be tantamount to denying his own blood. He had grown up in a region of the Golden State that hosted vast numbers of immigrants and tolerated a dual sense of heritage, so at the same time he grew up with a Californian's expanded sense of the possible.

As the son of an immigrant family, he remained at least symbolically linked to the old country, but he was even more a product of California who wrote fiction essays and nonfiction tales, absolutely refusing to be limited by definitions. As a result, he retained a strong empathy for the dispossessed of all colors and an enduring disdain for oppressors of all colors.

He wasn't exactly enamored of the critical establishment, and early went on the offensive. In 1938, he wrote a letter to the editors of The Nation that said, in part:

I would like to protest against the type of reviewer your magazine has been assigning to my books lately. The reviews seem to be brilliant but are invariably unfriendly and scornful. This is no way to treat a great writer, I believe. In the future I would appreciate it very much if you would allow personal friends of mine to review my books.⁸

Here, too, he was indulging in a fiction, although this time it became prophetic. In later years, critics would indeed excoriate him.

Saroyan's playfulness extended to his literary output, too. A story to him was anything that worked as a story. His personal experience of literature had begun with the oral tradition, and it was a link he relished. Much of his short fiction sounded like yarns told at a neighborhood bar. Critics attacked his lack of plot, his sentimentality, his carelessness. When Eric Bentley leveled the latter charge, the author responded simply, “One cannot expect an Armenian to be an Englishman.” Case closed.

In the best pieces from the San Francisco period, his literary instincts seemed just right; in other works, he did indeed seem undisciplined and uncritical, just as he seemed urgent and egalitarian. “My writing is a letter to anybody,” he explained. He was, moreover, his own biggest fan in the tradition of Walt Whitman, a lover of American language also in the tradition of Whitman, and a product of his times in the tradition of John Dos Passos. He learned to present variations of the news of the day plus his own fantasies as a kaleidoscopic array: “Mr. Chaplin weeping, Stalin, Hitler, a multitude of Jews, tomorrow is Monday, no dancing in the streets.”

“The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” his first major story, presented the thoughts and impressions flashing through the mind of a starving young writer. Saroyan's stylistic triumph in the story is that he forced readers to become co-creators—to assemble the fragments—in order to grasp the tale within the tale.

One thing the author had observed first in Fresno, then in San Francisco, was how members of “respectable society” could distance themselves from the problems of those struggling for survival, and that knowledge would buttress his theme in “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” This interior monologue is at once revealing of a bright young mind spinning as starvation constricts it, and of a time in which national expectation also seemed to be spinning.

The starving artist achieves a meditative state, intellectual clarity, but a sense too of his inability to crack through the city's—and the world's—veneer, as though he has “ventured upon the wrong earth or into the wrong age.” The story's motif is the lyric of a popular song—“He flies through the air with the greatest of ease, the daring young man on the flying trapeze”—but this trapeze is suspended from eternity. When the protagonist dies, a unity tantamount to nirvana is achieved:

Then swiftly, neatly, with the grace of the young man on the trapeze, he was gone from his body. For an eternal moment he was all things at once: the bird, the fish, the rodent, the reptile, and man. An ocean of print undulated endlessly and darkly before him. The city burned. The herded crowd rioted. The earth circled away, and knowing that he did so, he turned his lost face to the empty sky and became dreamless, unalive, perfect.⁹

This story, called everything from surrealism to magical realism, was so original and unlikely that it escaped critical categories and brought its young author a period of critical grace.

Its unrelenting conclusion was really no surprise. Saroyan had been raised in an area where poverty and wealth visibly abutted, where death was life's constant companion, and where the California dream was always shadowed, so he learned to see human pretensions ironically. “If you will remember that living people are as good as dead, you will be able to perceive much that is very funny in their conduct that you perhaps might never have thought of perceiving if you did not believe that they were as good as dead.”¹⁰

In “Seventy Thousand Assyrians,” he employed a more discursive style and a broader canvas. This tale confirmed that the youthful author had somehow developed the ability to write about himself without becoming private or obscure. His generous vision assumed that the human heart was everyone's real subject, and that the human heart was essentially the same in males and females, in blacks and whites, in Armenians, in Japanese, in Filipinos … in all of us.

The narrative voice in “Seventy Thousand Assyrians” is clearly Saroyan himself, an American who is also an Armenian: the scion of one nation that was beginning to dominate the world and another that had narrowly escaped genocide. A cultural stew is revealed in a barber school's cut-rate shop where a white boy from Iowa divulges that he is on the road in search of work, a Japanese American apprentice barber shaves a tramp with “one of those faces that emerge from years and years of evasive living.”

The narrator's own barber is an Assyrian named Theodore Badal, and the two men establish an immediate comradeship. “We are hopeful,” the narrator tells the barber. “There is no Armenian living who does not still dream of an independent Armenia. …”

“Dream?” replies the barber. “Well that is something. Assyrians cannot even dream anymore … do you know how many of us are left on earth?”

The narrator is told that only seventy thousand remain of the people who once ruled the ancient world; then the barber goes on to describe the end of a culture as devastating as the destruction of American Indian peoples—a way of living, of thinking, soon to be lost forever: “Seventy Thousand Assyrians and the Arabs are still killing us. They killed seventy of us in a little uprising last month. There was a paragraph in the paper.” The American dilemma for immigrants is also revealed: “My brother is married to an American girl and he has a son. There is no hope.” Of course there is hope, but it is hope for a new world, represented by American blending, not for the old one. Hitler would soon render the young writer's vision prophetic. “Well, they may go down physically like Iowa or spiritually like Badal, but they are the stuff that is eternal in man. … I am thinking of Theodore Badal … himself, the whole race.” (All quotes from After Thirty Years: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, p. 151.)

A critical cult of Saroyan arose following the publication of his first collection. “There is nothing either blatant or meretricious about young Mr. Saroyan's writing. There is simply his intense curiosity about life,” wrote William Rose Benet in the Saturday Review of Literature.¹¹ Critics, generally, seemed willing to allow the young Californian his excesses in exchange for his considerable dynamism. Saroyan dedicated his second volume of short fiction, Inhale and Exhale (1936) to “the English tongue, the American earth, and the Armenian spirit.” For this English-speaking ex-farm laborer impelled by the tragedy of his heritage, it was an appropriate dedication.

Inhale and Exhale was more than twice as long as Saroyan's first collection of fiction, and was stuffed with poorly edited—probably unedited, in fact—tales; this volume contained far too many inept stories. It was, however, by no means uniformly weak; in fact, it also contained some of the author's finest work, but that highlighted the great contrast in quality of its contents. Saroyan's apparent inability to tell the difference was perhaps the result of his unsystematic, idiosyncratic training, the very process that produced in him that original vision.

Compelling stories like “The Broken Wheel” and “Antranik of Armenia” also show the author employing his Armenian heritage with great effect. The former is a little gem: its narrator is a small boy whose widowed mother is supporting four children; their lives are brightened by visits from Uncle Vahan, who drives a red Apperson and gives them rides. The narrator is a newsboy, and he has bought himself a cornet and a bicycle, but when the uncle's unexpected death becomes linked with a broken wheel on the bicycle, the boy does not repair it. Saroyan's selection and use of details, and his ability to associate feelings with things is impressive in this tale.

“Antanik of Armenia” deals more explicitly with the author's heritage, for it recounts the visit of a famous general to Fresno. “Their vines,” he writes, “were exactly like the vines of California and the faces of the Armenians of Armenia were exactly like the faces of the Armenians of California” (p. 264). It also presents yet another uncle—this one clearly modeled after his mother's younger brother, Aram, the attorney called “something like an Armenian shadow mayor of Fresno” by Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford.¹² The story's real message, however, is that hatred for the Turkish oppressors while understandable, is not in itself noble.

In fact, during this early period of his career, the Fresno native spent considerable energy reconciling his dual heritage. He was, to an exaggerated degree, all those Americans who say they are “Italian” or “Irish” or “Mexican,” when in fact they know those places only indirectly. In “The Armenian and the Armenians,” he transcended the entire problem when he went beyond region to a state of mind: “There are only Armenians, and they inhabit the earth, not Armenia, since there is no Armenia. … There is no America and there is no England, and no France, and no Italy. There is only the earth. …”

To be Armenian is to be human, and that—our shared humanity—is the bottom line. “If I want to do anything,” he wrote, “I want to speak a more universal language, the heart of man, the unwritten part of man, that which is eternal and common to all races.”

The influence of San Francisco continued in various stories in later Saroyan collections. His generous, multicultural vision had been developed long before he perfected his craft in the Bay Area, but in San Francisco he observed a richness of types and situations that allowed him to explore a wider range of human conflicts than he had previously known. Years after leaving the city by the bay, he would explain that he'd like to consider himself part of the expatriate scene in Europe that produced so many great writers in the 1920s, concluding: “There was something American about it.” He couldn't, however, because his “San Francisco deal was rather Armenian, or at least European.” So the American experience was in Europe and the European experience was in San Francisco … according to Saroyan.

The cosmopolitan part of the Bay Area had its own dark side. “The Filipino and the Drunkard” in Love, Here is My Hat and Other Short Romances (1938), for instance, reflects the legacy of anti-Asian racism that even now burdens much of California. A drunken white man is bullying a Filipino on a ferry, chasing the frightened, smaller man while mouthing a too familiar complaint: “You fellows are the best dressed men in San Francisco and you make your money washing dishes. You've got no right to wear such fine clothes.” Meanwhile, the other passengers on the ferry, in a scene that resembles the inhumane pedestrians of Eugene O'Neil's The Hairy Ape, refuse to intercede. Finally, the drunk—“a real American … wounded twice in the war”—forces the frightened Filipino to defend himself. In the resulting struggle, the bully is killed and the broken Filipino pleads, “I did not want to hurt him.” Then he asks the question the whole society should answer: “Why didn't you stop him?” (p. 100).

Despite a slimness of plot that borders on emaciation, The Time of Your Life, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and the Drama Critics' Circle Award for 1938, represents the high point of Saroyan's San Francisco work. Set in Nick's, a waterfront saloon modeled after Izzy Gomez's speakeasy on Pacific Street—a prototypical Bay Area setting—the play involved an amazing cast of characters. Because San Francisco developed as a seaport, it historically boasted a diverse population, buoyed always by the hopeful poor. The diversity of people he found so easily in the Bay Area, their voices and their styles, allowed Saroyan to create speeches in this play that amount to spoken fictions.

Monologues by Kit Carson, Harry and Kitty, along with the rest, constitute oral stories in the Saroyan tradition, fiction presented via actors. He employed his unique version of stream of consciousness, a sort of spoken scrapbook of thoughts that occasionally harked back to his earlier published material; Harry, whose words resemble those of the unnamed protagonist of “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,” ruminates:

I've got an eight-ball problem. George the Greek is shooting a game of snooker with Pedro the Filipino. I'm in rags. They're wearing thirty-five-dollar suits, made to order. I haven't got a cigarette. They're smoking Bobby Burns panatelas. I'm thinking it over like I always do. George the Greek is in a tough spot. If I buy a cup of coffee, I'll want another cup. What happens? My ear aches! My ear. George the Greek takes the cue. Chalks it. Studies the table. Touches the cue-ball delicately. Tick. What happens? He makes the three-ball. What do I do? I get confused. I go out and buy a morning paper. What the hell do I want with a morning paper? Thursday, the twelfth. Maybe the headline's about me. I take a quick look. No. The headline is not about me. It's about Hitler. Seven thousand miles away. I'm here. Who the hell is Hitler? Who's behind the eight-ball? I turn around. Everybody's behind the eight-ball.¹³

Everybody is indeed, and in Harry's buzzing mind the personal and cosmic merged into a prescient sense, universalizing the particular, particularizing the universal.

True to Saroyan's darker vision, the incantation of the Arab persists as a motif in the play, never far from its core or from society's dilemmas: “No foundation all the way down the line.” Even his most entertaining literature is layered with deep sadness. Richard Rodriguez once said, “Saroyan's work appealed to me because he was one California writer who never lost sight of the darkness.”¹⁴

More to the point, perhaps, the Fresnan's characters remind readers that America's population is a collection of immigrants. In his work, few characters are without deep roots; they frequently reveal not only personal but cultural memories; thus, he denies the American illusion of new beginnings, always new beginnings. We have pasts whether we like them or not.

William Saroyan's generosity of vision, and the richness of his cast, developed in no small measure during the period when he was writing The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze; Howard Floan has correctly pointed out that “Saroyan's first book belongs to San Francisco.”¹⁵ While he would frequently return to that setting and those experiences, soon other places and values began to dominate in his writing—most notably, perhaps, the multiethnic Fresno of My Name Is Aram (1940).

Many writers and critics of the thirties wanted to create a new, idealized society; Saroyan's work seemed anathema to them. He wanted to acknowledge the complexity and dynamics of the actual society and see if it could be made workable. He also recognized those general qualities that all human beings share, as well as the deep resonation of family, nation, and race. All of this was presented in an original, irreverent, high-energy style that captured the hustle of city life, something that had not failed to impress the small-town boy. His writing was designed to make us grateful for every moment of life and to stretch our spirits. He worked outside the paradigm of the decade, thus altering it, influencing important later artists such as Richard Brautigan and Gary Soto, both of whom, like Saroyan, managed to retain a childlike wonder while acknowledging life's disasters and, like Saroyan, moved beyond conventional definitions of what stories should be.

William Saroyan, literary prodigy, whose genius emerged in San Francisco, remains a singular American voice. His influences were many—everything from Turkey to Turlock—but no one denies that his interval in the Bay Area (when members of his family thought he was merely loafing) led not only to his discovery by the world of letters, but to some of his most significant work.

As a writer, Willie was always a gambler. As a gambler, he was …

Picture him at Izzy Gomez's saloon in the four-bit game. Fedora perched on the back of his head, cigarette dangling from his lips, he shields his cards from other players and challenges: “Oh, yeah? I'll have a story in Harper's by Christmas, you wait. Who wants to bet a buck I won't! Come on. Who'll bet?”

That's a wager he won.

Notes

1. Aram Saroyan, William Saroyan (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), 48.

2. Richard Rodriguez, “America's Wild Child,” in Many Californians: Literature from the Golden State, ed. Gerald Haslam (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1992), 341.

3. Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford, Saroyan, a Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) p. 208.

4. Dickran Kouymijian, “The Last of the Armenian Plays,” in William Saroyan: The Man and the Writer Remembered, ed. Leo Hamalian (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson Press, 1987), 125.

5. From My Name Is Saroyan, edited by James H. Tashjian (New York, Coward, McCann, 1983), 16-17.

6. Floan, William Saroyan, 19.

7. From Don't Go Away Mad and Other Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949).

8. The Nation, 10 September 1938, 252.

9. William Saroyan, After Thirty Years: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1964), 142.

10. Floan, William Saroyan, 22.

11. William Rose Benet, Saturday Review of Literature, 10 October 1934, 217.

12. Saroyan: A Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 211.

13. William Saroyan, The Time of Your Life and Two Other Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1952), 121.

14. Interview with the author.

15. Floan, William Saroyan, 30.

Bibliographic Note

William Saroyan was a prolific author. A list of his publications would be very long indeed. Saroyan's works mentioned in this essay include After Thirty Years: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1964), Don't Go Away Mad and Other Plays (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949), Inhale and Exhale (New York: Random House, 1936), Love, Here Is My Hat and Other Short Romances (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), The Time of Your Life and Two Other Plays (London: Faber and Faber, 1942), and My Name Is Saroyan, ed. James H. Tashjian (New York: Coward, McCann, 1983). For a full inventory of his publications up to 1964, see David Kherdian, A Bibliography of William Saroyan 1934-64 (San Francisco: R. Beacham, 1965). More recent works are noted in William Saroyan: The Man and the Writer Remembered, edited by Leo Hamalian (Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987) or in A Literary History of the American West, edited by Thomas J. Lyon et al. (For Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987).

One particularly valuable later publication is My Name Is Saroyan, a collection of Saroyan's Hairenik pieces, edited by James H. Tashjian. On a similar theme, Nona Balakian pointed out Saroyan's position as the preeminent Armenian American writer in “Writers on the American Scene,” published in Ararat (Winter 1977).

The finest introduction to Saroyan's career remains Howard Floan's William Saroyan (New York: Twayne, 1966). His booklet of the same title in the Western Writers Series (Boise State University, 1966), while brief, is also solid. Another valuable, short critical assessment is H. W. Matelene's “William Saroyan” in Dictionary of Literary Biography 7 (1980), 206-227.

Saroyan: A Biography by Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford (New York: Harper & Row, 1984) is to date the most satisfying examination of his personal life, and Aram Saroyan's William Saroyan (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983) offers a son's perspectives. The aforementioned volume edited by Leo Hamalian contains both critical and biographical essays of significance.