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Saroyan is well known as a prolific writer, boasting that he wrote his twenty-six stories for the Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories in as many days. He was 26 when that collection was published, and he rarely slowed his output for the next fifty years. While much of his writing remains unpublished, below is the most complete list available of his published short stories, created by Dori Myer in 2021. Pulling from magazines, anthologies, and his books of short stories, the archives developed a list that contains nearly 600 unique entries. Included are the publication titles and dates, giving you insight into which were his most popular short stories and which ones saw very limited release. While it is likely not every story he published, it is by far the most complete list compiled in one location.

Because Saroyan’s short stories always existed in the liminal space between fiction and autobiography, this list is a work in progress as deeper research and analysis reveals more unearthed treasures and teases apart nonfiction essays from fictional stories. But then, as Saroyan puts it, “I have always written what I had to write, such as this. What is it? It's not a story, it's not even a proper autobiographical fragment.” Perhaps like myths and folk tales, the distinction is not necessary?

“I like to go out every day and find a story. Well, it’s not quite that cut and dried, and if the truth is told I don’t like to go out every day and find a story at all. I only like to go out, to go out. I can stay in and choose a story from out of a possible ten thousand stories always in my head, eyes, ears, nose, and throat. If it is time to write, you have already been out, you have already found a story, at least one for every day of your life, possibly two, three, or four. Perhaps even a dozen stories for every day. What is a story? It’s a writer with his mind made up to tell a story. To remember something, or to invent something. (It comes to the same thing.)” – Chance Meetings

Readers and Writing in His Own Words
(Excerpted from Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who, 1961)

The only readers who are readers, the only readers who mean anything to a work of writing, and therefore possible a little something to the writer of the work himself, are the readers who read the way writers write: consciously, aware of themselves, aware of the work being read, aware of writing itself, and therefore able to get the writing, to know it, to understand what it's all about, what's going on. There are many kinds of writers and many kinds of readers, but the writers who are really writers and the readers who are really readers probably have one thing in common: being on the level without being pompous about it. And it's easy to get off the level, and it's easy to get pompous about just about anything.

It happens all the time in writing, and it happens all the time in reading. When a book is read by great numbers of people, it doesn't mean the book is good, but it also doesn't mean it is not good, it only means it is being read by great numbers of people. The writer of the book knows if it's good or bad, because he knows what he can do, what he has done, and what's more important, he knows what other writers have done. If any of my stuff happens to get a lot of readers, as two of my books have, I don't tend to believe I've made it, I tend to wonder who the readers are and why they are reading those two books in such great numbers. Well, one of the books, My Name Is Aram, deserves to be read, and can do the reader no harm. But the other one, The Human Comedy, is different. There are some lapses in it which many readers like even more than they like stuff that is at least a little better, and this doesn't please me. If the stuff that went off the level is taken for gospel as it frequently is, it can do more harm than I want any of my writing ever to do. Now, you might say that the harm is harmless harm, but as for me, the hell with that. I didn't mean to go off the level, I meant the opposite. I meant to take a lot of everyday stuff and bring out the drama of it, but near the end of the book I went to work and wrote that it appears to be unavoidable sometimes for people to be killed in a war. I went even further and tried to demonstrate that the murder of somebody in a war can be a thing of great meaning-to somebody or other, sometime or other. Bullshit-but I was in a hurry, the war was upon me, and I wanted to get this thing out of the way before it got me, which it did soon enough, and the hell with that, too. I fought the United States Army for three years, and I won. I'm sorry for every man who fought, and lost.

What happens? What is it that really happens to a man?

Stories and Essays

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