SOURCE: "It Reads Like Fiction," in The New Republic, Vol. XLIX, No. 1277, May 24, 1939, pp. 78-9.

In the following excerpt from a review of Peace, It's Wonderful, Ferguson comments on the fragmentary quality of the stories and on the progress Saroyan has made as a writer since publishing his earliest fiction.

The twenty-seven new Saroyans in this seventh book [Peace, It's Wonderful] show the author's growth in discipline and ease in the form (for example, he doesn't have to write that he is a great writer until page 117, an almost final triumph over doubt). Saroyan's form isn't that of the plotted story, where things happen from a beginning through a middle toward an end. Nothing "happens": he jumps full-tilt into the middle and full-tilt out, like a kid hopping a truck. Though he has done much with it, it is not particularly his: it is the artful form of...