SOURCE: "The Art of Mr. Saroyan," in New York Herald Tribune Books, August 15, 1937, p. 4.

A highly respected American literary critic, Kazin is best known for his essay collections The Inmost Leaf (1955), Contemporaries (1962), and On Native Grounds (1942), a study of American prose writing since the era of William Dean Howells. In the following enthusiastic review of Little Children, he commends Saroyan's evocation of childhood and notes that the book is appealing despite its shortcomings,

Mr. Saroyan is one of these rare writers (not always the most gifted but usually the most delicate) who can write only of themselves, but mould and even destroy the outer frame of sentimental autobiography. A Saroyan story is not so much a chronicle as it is a tender, even a timid, evocation of a world in which other little men may snicker or weep. There are immigrants in it, children, wistful heroism and swaggering...