William Saroyan 's life, so crucial to an understanding of his controversially autobiographical short fiction, was fraught with instability and change. When Saroyan was three his father, Armenak Saroyan, died, and William and his brother and two sisters had to leave their hometown of Fresno, California, to live in an orphanage in Oakland. In 1915 they returned to Fresno, where they joined their mother, Takooki Saroyan, then working as a domestic servant. Saroyan attended public schools and eventually got a job as a messenger boy for a telegraph company, a job which later became one of the major sources for his fiction and drama. After dropping out of high school he moved to San Francisco, where he worked at various jobs and eventually became a clerk, then a telegraph operator, for Postal Telegraph Company. In 1928 he published his first story in Overland Monthly and Outwest Magazine and took a...