SOURCE: "Mr. Saroyan—Still His Own Hero," in The New York Times Book Review, November 19, 1944, pp. 3, 36.

In the following review, Norton finds the stories in Dear Baby trite.

William Saroyan has had another affair with his heart, and he calls the little one Dear Baby. It is somewhat underweight (117 pages) and not so lusty as the others have been, but it's a Saroyan, all right. It has the smile on its lips, the lump in its throat, the tear in its eye, and the bag full of tricks—the same old tricks.

The twenty pieces in Dear Baby have been written over a period of ten years. The earliest was published in 1935, the year after Saroyan made the first public announcement of his genius in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. But the book is no publisher's potpourri of things left over after a young writer...