William Saroyan's Fresno: Armenian California

William Saroyan was born in Fresno in nineteen oh eight, the son of an Armenian immigrant preacher named Armenak Saroyan who had come to California from Ottoman-controlled territory and who died when William was three. His mother could not support four children alone, and Saroyan spent part of his childhood in an orphanage in Oakland before the family returned to Fresno. He grew up in the Armenian neighborhoods of the city, inside a community that had been building itself since the eighteen nineties.

Armenian immigrants had begun arriving in Fresno in the last decade of the nineteenth century, refugees from Ottoman persecution who found in the San Joaquin Valley something familiar: a semi-arid agricultural climate, grape-growing soils, a geography that resembled the Anatolian plateau they had left. They planted vineyards and peach orchards and built a community whose specific density, the concentration of Armenian social life in a particular set of Fresno blocks, gave Saroyan a subject that took him a lifetime to exhaust.

After nineteen fifteen, when the Ottoman government carried out the organized mass killing of Armenians, survivors came in a second wave to Fresno. The community Saroyan grew up in contained people who had made it through that event. He absorbed what they carried without fully writing about it directly, working instead around the edges, writing about the comedy and the sorrow of being alive in a specific California city in the nineteen thirties as a person whose community's catastrophe was not something the American reading public knew how to receive.

He won the Pulitzer Prize in nineteen forty for The Time of Your Life, a play set in a San Francisco waterfront bar, and declined it on principle. He spent the rest of his career writing about Fresno. His burial request, the sources report, was to be interred half in Fresno and half in Yerevan, Armenia, which is what happened. One source notes this without independent confirmation from burial records. The request, whether fully verifiable or not, is the correct biography: he belonged to two places and asked to be split between them.