The world of William Saroyan

the long version

In this work, the author tells how Saroyan transformed the short story by personalizing it and by loosening the structure of the novella form. He went on to bring new life to the theater and to the telling of autobiography. Better than that of any recent drama critic, Balakian's chapters on the theater place Saroyan's plays in the larger framework of the American theater of his time and achieve the creation of a total picture of the state of the American theater of the 1930s. In fact, this is more than a book on Saroyan. Tracing the progression of his work, Balakian reconstructs the total climate of the era in which Saroyan's varied talents emerged, and eventually reveals his inability to cope with the post-World War II world. Waiting like a pre-Beckett character for a future that never was to be, Saroyan used his reminiscences of the past in quite a different way from Proust: running through the memories of an average man on a bicycle rather than as an aristocrat in a cloistered abode. Propelled by the peripeties, the advances and retreats, of an unprotected life, he gave a new twist to the writing of biography.