SOURCE: Haslam, Gerald. “William Saroyan and San Francisco: Emergence of a Genius (Self-Proclaimed).” In San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature, edited by David Fine and Paul Skenazy, pp. 111-25. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Haslam offers an account of Saroyan's rise to fame in the 1930s and 1940s, highlighting the significance of California and the Fresno area as important settings in and literary influences on his fiction.

First the terrain: not flat, but swooping, swerving, leading the eye first skyward where gulls seemed to hang, then down toward the bay or the vast Pacific, then up once more toward hills where the rich lived.

And the fog: On the coast, it was fluffy and damp and it visited much of summer—unlike the frigid miasma that burdened Fresno each winter. The young writer wore a sweater during June, July, and...