Biography Essay

Growing up in an Armenian immigrant community in the San Joaquin Valley of California with both of his grandmothers as storytellers was a propitious circumstance for William Saroyan's career as a writer. Witnessing the behavior of an individualistic, free-spirited people who have endured for centuries the sadness of expatriation gave him immediately at hand the raw material of art. "I began to believe I was a writer when I was in the third grade at Emerson School in Fresno," Saroyan said, "and I began to be a writer when I was thirteen and had used up the better part of my first week's wages as a telegraph messenger in the buying of a secondhand upright Underwood typewriter."

Saroyan's father came to New York in 1905 from the mountainous Armenian-Kurdish town of Bitlis in eastern Turkey, eventually settling in Fresno, California, with its large population of Armenian-Americans. When...