Saroyan's Study of Ethnicity

Abstract

At one time William Saroyan was America's most famous ethnic writer more famous than ethnic, perhaps. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Saroyan exploded onto the literary scene as a true wunderkind, the writer who was singlehandedly revolutionizing the form of both the short story and the drama. He was the man who refused the Pulitzer Prize and argued with Louis B. Mayer over the issue of artistic integrity. As a literary personality, he had an instinctive desire to be a part of the American cultural scene, to feel that he counted on such a stage. Yet at the same time he felt apart from it, hating the entrepreneurs of culture and his writing rivals with such a passion he was often dismissive of the popular mainstream culture of his day. In these moods he was apparently satisfied with his own artistic ego and his quieter working out in his fiction of his own cultural dilemma.