For this contempt Saroyan cannot really be blamed, and, perhaps, should be praised. Born in 1908, far from the northeastern cultural metropole, to Armenian immigrants in Fresno, California, Saroyan lost his father, Armenak (whose English was good) in 1911 and spent the next four years in an Oakland orphanage, while his mother, Takoohi (whose English was poor), worked in San Francisco, visiting her children on weekends. When Saroyan was seven, the family was reunited in Fresno, where Armenians, he says, "were considered ... unattractive foreigners," and where he "despised those Armenian boys who toadied to 'the American.'" In Fresno, he began combining work at odd jobs--frequently as a newsboy or as a telegraph messenger--with public school.
Looking back on this childhood, Saroyan has found in it his beginnings as a playwright: "By the time I was eight," he has written, "I was beginning to understand that there was something to the art [of inventing roles to play and playing them], and that I had the privilege of controlling it." In the role of a newsboy he says he learned "nonchalance, ease, poise, repartee, and the art of entrance and exit, particularly into and out of saloons and gambling joints." In fact, "It was all drama ...
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