[Canby was a professor of English at Yale University and one of the founders of the Saturday Review of Literature, where he served as editor in chief from 1924 to 1936. He was the author of many books, including The Short Story in English (1909), a history of that genre which was long considered the standard text for college students. In the following review of My Name Is Aram, Canby hails the artistry of Saroyan's accounts of a young Armenian boy in America who experiences are strongly colored by his heritage.]

I intend to be enthusiastic about this book, and so I should like to make it clear, first of all, that I am no bought-andsold admirer of Mr. Saroyan. I didn't much like The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, thought it too clever by half, thought that Mr. Saroyan, on the stage and off it, was one of the characteristic products of Broadway bred to Hollywood out of (often) Chicago—precocious, smartalecky, over-sophisticated, under-educated—a late Greek, Europeanized-Oriental production, sure to be amusing, and sure to be forgotten. I may have been right, or all wrong. Whatever I thought, My Name Is Aram has converted me to a belief in William Saroyan as a contributor to American literature and made me feel that I ought to reassess him from the beginning up.

For the book, in its highly original way, has linked itself to one of the most fertile lines of the American literary tradition; while at the same time adding a new element of the utmost importance for an imaginative study of America as America is. It is an Armenian book, charged with the Christianized orientalism of the Armenians, rich in the highly humorous contrasts of their ideal of living in a California environment, written with the naïve blend of spirituality and realistic cynicism that one finds in Arabic popular literature. And at the same time it is intensely American. It belongs on the same shelf with Aldrich's Story of a Bad Boy, with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (particularly the latter), and with Tarkington's Penrod. One could write an essay on changing American mores in a small boy's America that has not, after all, so much changed, by comparing, chapter by chapter, My Name Is Aram and Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain stuffed the prejudices, the folk lore, the freedom, and the ideals of the Mississippi valley into his books; Saroyan has depicted the pioneer generation of the native born of foreign stock, adjusting themselves to America with rude aggressiveness, and complex imaginations and immense energies—youngsters perfectly at home in a California that looks them over with shocked surprise. Both books give us types to think about, and if Saroyan works in shallower soil and keeps nearer the surface, he scarcely is less amusing and often as evocative of a boy's imagination.

The events in this little book are all boys' events: there are fishing parties, and the large adventures of Aram (who knew he could drive a car just by looking at it) with the millionaire Indian, who, being also an imperfectly adjusted American, took his immense pleasure in seeing a small boy have a good time. There is Aram's back-strapping experience when he mixed in an American love affair, his adventures with a country choir, his adventures on a first trip to a big city. They are all trivial in themselves, and perfectly delightful. But the solid Armenian life background, with its sets of values and its characters entirely different from what we think of as Californian, are not trivial; and the personality of this Americanizing Armenian who becomes under your eyes, as you read, a new race, puzzling his grandparents even more than his school teachers, is not trivial at all. I prefer the adjectives perceptive, humorous, imaginative, original. I should vote, indeed, for this story of an Armenian boyhood as the most truly American book of the year.