William Saroyan(Barry) William Saroyan (1908 – 1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940. Three years later he also won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. The novel had originally been written not as a full-length novel but as a movie script which the studio rejected.

At the age of three, after his father's death, Saroyan, along with his brother and sister, was placed in an orphanage in Oakland, California. He later went on to describe his experience at the orphanage in his writings. Five years later, the family reunited in Fresno, where his mother, Takuhi, had already secured work at a cannery. Many of Saroyan's stories were based on his childhood experiences among the Armenian-American fruit growers of the San Joaquin Valley or dealt with the rootlessness of the immigrant. The short story collection, My Name is Aram (1940), an international bestseller, was about a young boy and the colorful characters of his immigrant family. It has been translated into many languages.

Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California, and I always considered him an Armenian-American writer, because so much of his writing is suffuse with the culture, heritage, tragic history and traditions of his native people. Much in the same way that one could argue that J.D. Salinger possessed a distinctively unique voice, the same could be said of Saroyan. His writing defied and frequently obliterated many of the conventional rules of creative writing, and I highly doubt that any self-respecting editor would publish his unusual writings today.

Saroyan could be bombastic, emotional in the extreme while ignoring many of the accepted conventional rules that govern contemporary prose. He wrote poorly when, under emotional stress (i.e. the IRS threatening to put him in jail if he didn’t make good on his unpaid back taxes), and yet Saroyan turned out literary masterpieces when at the top of his game.

The author has been described in a Dickinson College news release as "one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century." Stephen Fry observed that William Saroyan was "one of the most underrated writers of the twentieth century." Fry suggests that "he takes his place naturally alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner". Kurt Vonnegut described Saroyan was "the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists.”

Interest in Saroyan's novels declined after the war, when he was criticized for sentimentality. Freedom, brotherly love, and universal benevolence were for him basic values, but critics considered his idealism out of step with the times. Saroyan followed his own literary vision and made no apologies for being at odds of step with the public fervor of ethnic hatred and mistrust following the war.

Saroyan's stories of the period characteristically devote an unvarnished attention to the trials and tribulation, social malaise and despair of the Depression. He worked rapidly, hardly editing his text, while drinking and gambling away much of his earnings. As mentioned earlier, this lack of personal and domestic discipline got the author in hot water with the federal government in middle age.

The following quotes were gathered from various literary sources on the internet.

I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from
myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country,
my world, my time, and my culture. I am not
estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in
everything about God excepting God indefinable,
inside all and careless of all.
— from Here Comes There Goes You Know Who, 1961

“In the time of your life, live—so that in that good
time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or
for any life your life touches. Seek goodness
everywhere, and when it is found, bring it out of its
hiding place and let it be free and unashamed.

Place in matter and in flesh the least of the values, for these
are the things that hold death and must pass away. Discover in
all things that which shines and is beyond corruption. Encourage
virtue in whatever heart it may have been driven into secrecy and
sorrow by the shame and terror of the world. Ignore the obvious,
for it is unworthy of the clear eye and the kindly heart.

“I should like to see any power of the world destroy
this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose
history is ended, whose wars have all been fought
and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose
literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose
prayers are no longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race.
Let us say that it is again 1915. There is war in the world.
Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from
their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread
nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they
will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if
the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer
parlor, twenty years after, and laugh, and speak in their tongue.
Go ahead, see if you can do anything about it. See if you can
stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons
of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the world, go ahead
and try to destroy them.”

“Good people are good because they've come to wisdom
through failure. We get very little wisdom from success,
you know.”

“You must remember always to give, of everything you have.
You must give foolishly even. You must be extravagant. You
must give to all who come into your life. Then nothing and no
one shall have power to cheat you of anything, for if you give
to a thief, he cannot steal from you, and he himself is then no
longer a thief. And the more you give, the more you will have
to give.”
― William Saroyan, The Human Comedy

“Each book can make a life or a fragment of it more beautiful.”

“It is simply in the nature of Armenian to study, to learn,
to question, to speculate, to discover, to invent, to revise,
to restore, to preserve, to make, and to give.”

“What do you mean, what's the matter with him? Nothing's
the matter with him, everything's the matter with him, the
same as it is with everybody else. He's just fine. He gets
overwhelmed now and then, and he doesn't know how to say
what he feels or means, so he cries and runs off a little, trying
to find out where to go, for God's sake. Where can you go?”
― William Saroyan, Madness in the Family: Stories

“The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.”

“I know you will remember this — that nothing good ever ends.
If it did, there would be no people in the world — no life at all,
anywhere. And the world is full of people and full of wonderful life.”
― William Saroyan, The Human Comedy

“What can I tell you, except the stupid little I know?”

One last personal observation: If you read a short story by William Saroyan and don’t feel just a tad bit lightheaded, tipsy, then you missed the deeper meaning.

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