In the spring of 1939, when the work of William Saroyan first reached the New York stage in the form of a one-act play entitled My Heart's in the Highlands, Sidney B. Whipple of the New York World-Telegram accused Saroyan and his producers of conducting a "painful experiment ... for one purpose--to test the I.Q. of the public and the critics." There is considerable justice in this philistine response, for when the play was published, Saroyan included in the volume its perplexed and conflicting reviews, and he added a preface, in which he pilloried "A number of drama critics [who] sincerely regretted they couldn't understand this simple play, and a number [who] were bored by it." Children, he wrote, were better prepared to cope with him than were the Eastern cognoscenti. And as Saroyan's subsequent plays were produced and published, he continued to surround them with autobiography and self-explanation...