The promising and, in the end, horrifying career of William
Saroyan is a case study in the limits of raw talent. Talent
Saroyan undoubtedly possessed, and in abundance. But he refused
to refine it or develop it, refused to educate or to discipline
himself, scorned the role of apprentice, scorned any role, in
fact, but that of genius. As a result his early and meteoric
success was succeeded by a long, humiliating, inevitable decline.
As John Leggett points out in his grimly
fascinating new
biography, by the time Saroyan was in his mid-thirties he was
already a burnt-out case.

He could look back on three of his
impressive assaults on the entertainment world: on publishing, on
Broadway theatre, and on Hollywood. For each there had been a
spectacular debut, shimmering with the promise of a major
discovery, followed by an overreaching, then a fizzling
disappointment, a falling out with close associates, and final
alienation. It was a rocket’s trajectory—and a short one.

For a few years in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Saroyan rode
a tidal wave of literary fame. His early short stories had
earned him an outsize reputation as an iconoclastic original,
possibly the American writer of his generation. “I have read
them with my eyes, ears, nose,” Kay Boyle commented on first
encountering the stories; Saroyan, she felt, was “terribly,
marvelously good … more alive and funnier than anyone else”.
In 1939, his annus mirabilis, Saroyan had three plays
running on Broadway