A DARING YOUNG MAN

Novelist Leggett, a former director of Iowa’s Workshop, makes a convincing case that Saroyan was more complex and interesting, both as man and as artist, than his current reputation suggests.

When Saroyan died, in 1981, his literary reputation had been on the wane for years. Today, if he’s remembered at all, it’s most likely as the writer of sentimental tales of “little people” suffering through adversity and emerging with their faith in humanity intact. But, as Leggett makes clear, Saroyan was driven as much by anger as by sentiment. Born in Fresno, California, in 1903, the son of Armenian immigrants, he spent five years in an orphanage after his father died and his mother wasn’t able to support him. The memory of these early hardships, combined with the prejudice over his ancestry he was later to encounter in school, instilled in him a lifelong hatred of social injustice, but also a sense of self-reliance that often manifested itself as arrogance and a refusal to listen to anyone’s advice but his own. His early success only cemented his intransigence: he published a bestselling story collection at the age of 26 and a decade later had three plays running on Broadway simultaneously, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Time of Your Life. Later, he won an Academy Award for his screenplay The Human Comedy (which he later adapted into a novel). Unfortunately, these early achievements were soon erased by his own self-destructive behavior. He married and divorced the same woman twice, gambled compulsively, and quarreled with editors, publishers, producers, other writers, and his own children. Leggett’s portrait is sympathetic without being sentimental, and he has a novelist's eye for the telling detail. A more thorough discussion of Saroyan’s actual work would have been appreciated, however, as Leggett assumes a familiarity with it that many readers won’t necessarily have.

Overall, a persuasive argument for reassessing the career of a neglected American writer.