In the following interview, originally conducted in 1975, Saroyan discusses his life and works with Basmadjian.

In the following essay, Kouymjian characterizes Saroyan's last two plays as his final theatrical statements, noting that although there are differences among them, the two works share a special kinship due to their link with Saroyan's experiences in the last year of his life.

Calonne is an American educator and critic. Assessing Saroyan's short story collections published in the second half of the 1930s, he determines that these works reflect an affirmation of life in an inhospitable, divisive modern world.

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.

In the following essay, Bedrosian examines three of Saroyan's early works, contending that the sense of self-sufficiency Saroyan portrays in his fiction is permeated with a sense of isolation and loneliness due to the personal circumstances of his own life.

In the following essay, McCole provides a highly critical assessment of Saroyan's originality as a writer.

Archer is an American author known for his histories and biographies intended for a young adult audience. In these studies, he avoids glossing over unpleasant aspects of history and presents famous figures realistically, depicting not only their strengths but also their failings and weaknesses. In the following excerpt, Archer recounts correspondences in which Saroyan discussed writing and his career.

In the following essay, Shear studies Saroyan's treatment of ethnicity in the stories in My Name Is Aram.

In the following essay, Balakian describes Saroyan's years in Broadway, focusing on critical reception of his works, Saroyan's reaction to his critics, and brief overviews of his most successful productions.

In the following essay, Calonne remarks on the centrality of ethnicity and diversity issues in Saroyan's work.

In the following essay, Remenyi offers a portrait of Saroyan, emphasizing the influence his character and predilections had on his writing.

In the following essay, Haslam provides a brief overview of Saroyan's works, focusing particularly on his contribution to the advancement of ethnic literature in the United States.

An American educator who served for over fifteen years as the president of The University of Michigan, Hatcher published works about the modern novel and modern drama as well as histories of the Great Lakes region. In the following excerpt, he contends that the strengths and weakness of Saroyan' s short fiction are directly related to his personality and outlook on life.

Haslam is an American educator, short story writer, and novelist. In the following essay, he traces the courses of Saroyan's literary career and critical reception.

In the following essay, Calonne discusses Saroyan's response to the Armenian genocide in his work, characterizing it as a complex relationship that affected his writing but did not negate his essentially positive outlook towards humanity.

Saroyan's philosophy is not a resolution of but a recognition and acceptance of the contradictions of life. He tells us that life is both funny and sad, both violent and tender, and that generally the contradictions are present in the same scene, the same person, at the same time. Consequently, critics could not define Saroyan's plays—to give one interpretation would conceal the other interpretations simultaneously maintained by the symbolism. This led many critics to reject Saroyan�...

In the following excerpt, Burgum perceives that Saroyan 's depiction of disillusioned, alienated Americans has evolved.

What we discover in the work of this most famous and prolific of Armenian-American writers [Saroyan] is a lifelong tension between the forces of good-humored acceptance and the more insistent voice of his own experience as the orphaned son of an Armenian immigrant…. Saroyan's relationship to his ethnic group [is] an affinity based less on the shared values of communal life than the common experience of "wounded homelessness," of belonging to a dying race, of having been abandoned...

Wilson, considered America's foremost man of letters in the twentieth century, wrote widely on cultural, historical, and literary matters. Perhaps his greatest contributions to American literature were his tireless promotion of writers of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and his essays introducing the best of modern literature to the general reader. In the following essay, Wilson perceives a decline in the quality of Saroyan's fiction after The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Other St...

In the following excerpt, Bedrosian examines the sense of waning community felt by ethnic individuals in Saroyan's fiction.

Rascoe was an American literary critic who contributed to such influential periodicals as the American Mercury, Bookman, Esquire, New York Herald Tribune Books, and Newsweek. In the following review of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Other Stories, he dedares Saroyan "an extraordinary talent" and lauds his promise as a writer.

In the following review, Norton finds the stories in Dear Baby trite.

During his years with the publishing firm Alfred A. Knopf Strauss edited works by Kobo Abe, Junichiro Tanizaki, Yukio Mishima, and Yasunari Kawabata, thereby playing an important role in the introduction of modern Japanese literature to American readers. In the following review of Inhale and Exhale, he judges Saroyan "the most prolific and uneven of writers. "

Fadiman became one of the most prominent American literary critics during the 1930s with his insightful and often caustic book reviews for the Nation and the New Yorker magazines. In the following excerpt from a review of Inhale and Exhale, he expresses a preference for Saroyan's description of characters and incidents over pondering on a grand scale: "I must confess that when Saroyan is being most himself and telling us all about the World and Life and Time and Death, I don't understa...

A drama critic for Time from 1938 to 1961, Kronenberger was a distinguished historian, literary critic, and author highly regarded for his expertise in eighteenth-century English history and literature. In the following review of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Other Stories, he acknowledges Saroyan's talent but maintains that he has yet to prove himself as a writer.

A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955), Contemporaries (1962), and On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American prose writing since the era of William Dean Howells. In the following enthusiastic review of Little Children, he commends Saroyan's evocation of childhood and notes that the book is appealing despite its shortcomings,

Older and less brilliant in his new book, "Obituaries," William Saroyan is still defying the rules, still the daring young man on the flying trapeze. Characteristically, this latest performance has a bit of the stunt in it, like a pie-eating contest or a six-day bicycle race. It might even be described as a death-defying leap, for "Obituaries" is a book about death. Its pretext—and here is the stunt—is that Mr. Saroyan will write about each of the 200 or so names li...

[Saroyan's] strongest writing, and there is much that is strong indeed, has always been in the short story, and there are many of those wonderful early ones in ["My Name Is Saroyan"]. He was a master of this most difficult of the prose forms and, in particular, could run the reader through changes with the discursive, free-flowing, seemingly inadvertent. Here is the beginning of "The First Day of Summer": The first day of summer was cold, foggy, damp, dark, an...

Canby was a professor of English at Yale University and one of the founders of the Saturday Review of Literature, where he served as editor in chief from 1924 to 1936. He was the author of many books, including The Short Story in English (1909), a history of that genre which was long considered the standard text for college students. In the following review of My Name Is Aram, Canby hails the artistry of Saroyan's accounts of a young Armenian boy in America who experiences are strongly colored by hi...

Peden is an American critic and educator who has written extensively on the American short story and on such American historical figures as Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams. In the following review of The Assyrian, and Other Stories, he states that the title story is respectable, though the remaining pieces are such that "even [Saroyan's most ardent admirers are likely to be quite unhappy. "]

"Chance Meetings" is another of the familiar, loosely tied remembrances that [Saroyan] has done before but, as always, there are new and marvelously alive passages, and his wonderful, unconditioned people…. Years ago Mr. Saroyan postulated that there are two kinds of writers: those who run to meet death, and those who fight to keep it off. It's always been clear which side he's on, and so every person he's met, everything he's done, becomes cause for celebrat...

So much for the omniscient observer. And the first-person narration. What you've got [in Chance Meetings: A Memoir] is the Ethnic Naïve. An Ethnic Naïve book will be less than two hundred pages long, with deep margins (for deep marginalia) and fat, blank chapter breaks. Also simple, sentence-length paragraphs that reveal simple-but-profound truth because, well, they're simple. (p. 599) William Saroyan is our Great Wise Old Armenian (Black, Pole, Jew) Who Deigns to Favor You with ...

In the following excerpt from a review of Peace, It's Wonderful, Ferguson comments on the fragmentary quality of the stories and on the progress Saroyan has made as a writer since publishing his earliest fiction.

In the following review, Peden judges the stories of Love highly uneven in quality.

[Saroyan's] contribution has been to write from joy, which is in short supply lately, and sparse as a tradition in our literature anyway, unless one looks back to some of the founding figures, such as Walt Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau. He predates the glut of black humor and rancorous ethnicity, the literary theater of cruelty and the absurd, though part of the point about Saroyan which is so interesting is that he has been a profoundly, innovatively "ethnic" writer—one of the very ...

Chance meetings, William Saroyan tells us, are sometimes memorable because they have a definite starting and stopping point and take on a quality of art, something concluded and whole, which cannot be improved upon. In [Chance Meetings] Mr. Saroyan proceeds to prove his thesis…. Chance Meetings is a sketchbook, a homily, a philosophy of the self written from a unique perspective about "the stragglers everywhere and all the time, from the very beginning of one's memory."… (...