Books: Proud to Be Great

HERE COMES THERE GOES You KNOW WHO (273 pp.)—William Saroyan—Simon & Schuster ($5.95).

In the early 1930s, Americans were being saturated with "tough" writing: Studs Lonigan swaggered the streets of Chicago, Hemingway's bulls and men met with grace under pressure, Popeye had his will of Temple Drake, and Erskine Caldwell's degenerates roistered on Tobacco Road. Upon all this hardness, rawness and ache, a volume of stories descended almost like a balm in 1934: The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, by a young man of 26, William Saroyan. The book was a mixture...