In 1915 they returned to Fresno, where they joined their mother, Takoohi Saroyan, then working as a domestic servant. Saroyan attended public schools and eventually got a job as a messenger boy for a telegraph company, a job that later became one of the major sources for his fiction and drama. After dropping out of high school he moved to San Francisco, where he worked at various jobs and eventually became a clerk, then a telegraph operator, for Postal Telegraph Company. In 1928 he published his first story in
Overland Monthly and Outwest Magazine and took a trip to New York, having decided to make writing his career.
Despite a prolific career, Saroyan's reputation as short-story writer still rests largely on his first collection, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories (1934). As with many of his later writings, Saroyan dashed these stories off at an amazing speed, yet the manner of composition seemed to add to the urgency of his tone. When the title piece was published in Story magazine in February 1934, the public response was so favorable that in less than a year Random House had compiled the collection.
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