I knew little of Saroyan before coming to Armenia, but his name kept drawing my attention in the city's book markets. Saroyan grew up in Fresno, California and tasted fame with his set of 1934 short stories, "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze".
I've learned that he an adoring critic, Nona Balakian, who happened to be an editor of the New York Times Book Review (and also happened to be a fellow Armenian).
Saroyan also penned the 1939 play, "The Time of Your Life" and won a Pulitzer for it, but refused the award. Some not so pleasing details of his personality. He appears to have been a total egoist. He is on record dubbing himself a literary superior of Hemingway and said of one of his short story collections...''damned near the 'Ulysses' of the American short story''.
Despite these unsavory aspects of his boasting character, he does seem to have left his mark on the literary world. A quick NY Times search on his name yields over 2200 references to him and a similar exercise with the New Yorker bring 28 results. Saroyan wrote short stories for the later in the 1970s towards the end of his life.
You can read more about Saroyan through the joy (and some times detriment) of Google Books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=OjZLNgfDKHwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Daring+Young+Man+on+the+Flying+Trapeze&ei=J0h0S-3nEKCSyQTjsv20BA&cd=1#v=onepage&q=&f=false
The story "Seventy Thousand Assyrians" is quiet good and reveals a bit about Saroyan's obsession with Hemingway and ethnicity.
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