Bound to honor its favorite son

Saroyan's greatest triumphs came early in his career. His 1939 play, "The Time of Your Life," is set in a waterfront saloon in San Francisco and limns the troubles of disparate characters -- a cop, a prostitute, a longshoreman -- who find solace in one another's misery. The play won a Pulitzer Prize, though Saroyan refused the award on the grounds that art should not be a competitive sport. (Later in life, however, Saroyan lobbied hard for the Nobel Prize for literature.)

Still, there's the widespread perception that Saroyan was a literary lightweight, a sentimentalist whose work is too old-fashioned to resonate now. Perhaps Saroyan was too prolific for his own good. Even after the early triumphs, including "The Time of Your Life" and "My Name is Aram," he continued to churn out an astonishing amount of material -- novels, journalism, plays, stories. Some good, some less so. But the best, according to Saroyan's champions, is sublime.

"Jack Kerouac was greatly influenced by Saroyan," said novelist Barry Gifford, who co-wrote a biography of Saroyan with Lawrence Lee in 1984. "There's a kind of gentle truth that he conveys in his work. It has a beautiful innocence about it." Gifford points to the 1979 book "Obituaries," a free-associative memoir that Gifford edited, as an example of Saroyan's mature artistry. "He's a writer that made it look very simple, but it's very difficult to do what he did. He was protean as a person and an artist."

Still, the early work seems frozen in time. "The Time of Your Life" feels a bit musty now, a sepia-toned example of socially conscious prewar entertainment. The same goes for "The Human Comedy," Saroyan's 1943 novel about a Fresno farming family that clings to hope despite the horrors of World War II and the scars it leaves on the community.

Maintaining a presence

Saroyan's far superior work is to be found in the stories that make up collections such as "My Name Is Aram" and "Fresno Stories." (Saroyan's son, Aram, grew up to be a well-known poet and novelist.) " 'My Name Is Aram' was drilled into me practically as soon as I could read," said Katherine Taylor, an Armenian American native of Fresno and the author of the novel "Rules for Saying Goodbye." "I'm sure his cadences are apparent in my work. I started reading him too early, and too often, for his voice not to have helped shape my own. I can't underestimate his influence on my development. Also, there's the obvious point of a little Armenian boy from Fresno managing to become a writer. His legacy made it possible for me to be an artist."