SOURCE: "The Boys in the Back Room: William Saroyan," in The New Republic, Vol. 103, No. 21, November 18, 1940, pp. 697-98.

Wilson, considered America's foremost man of letters in the twentieth century, wrote widely on cultural, historical, and literary matters. Perhaps his greatest contributions to American literature were his tireless promotion of writers of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, and his essays introducing the best of modern literature to the general reader. In the following essay, Wilson perceives a decline in the quality of Saroyan's fiction after The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Other Stories: "[A columnist is what William Saroyan seems sometimes in danger of becoming—the kind of columnist who depends entirely on a popular personality, the kind who never reads, who knows nothing in particular about anything, who merely turns on the tap every day and lets it run a column."]

The story becomes monotonous...