He was a young man with ebullient confidence in himself as a writer. Still, one rejection slip followed another. Then the turning point: the editors of
Story magazine accepted "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" for the February 1934 issue. Within the next few months
American Mercury,
Scribner's, the
Yale Review, the
New Republic,
Scholastic,
Harper's, and the
Atlantic Monthly were publishing his stories. In October 1934 Random House published Saroyan's first book, a collection of stories entitled
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.
This book affected the world of American fiction like a flow of spring water. People were moved and intrigued. They had never read anything like it before. The naturalness, clarity, and spontaneity of these stories attracted people who ordinarily did not read fiction. Their winsome artlessness charmed reviewers. Here was an unusual kind of Depression fiction. It understood the damaging sadness of unemployment and the smashed hopes of young men in an intimately personal and colloquially lyrical way. It appealed to a populist America by being anti-intellectual and anti-literature. The book was redolent of Whitman's warm assertion about his own Leaves of Grass: "This is no book, Camerado, this is a man." Saroyan did not focus on the comfortable middle class or on people in high places.
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