Today in history: Jack Kerouac and William Saroyan

William Saroyan (1908-1981)

On this date -- April 13 -- in 1939, William Saroyan's play, My Heart's in the Highlands, premiered in New York City. The Kerouac connection here is that Saroyan was an influence on Jack. Gerald Nicosia, in Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (University of California Press, 1994) says:

Sammy [Kerouac's friend, Sebastian Sampas] quickly infected Jack with his passion for William Saroyan. Here was a writer who wrote with tender humor about small-town people, a writer who found the simplest actions of everyday life worthy of investigation, and who most often tempered his judgments with sympathy. The fact that Jack's father considered Saroyan an idiot--feeling Saroyan had no sense of the tragedy of a life like Leo's--only increased Leo's belief that Sammy was a bad influence on Jack. (p. 72)

According to Nicosia, Jack himself described his collection of short stories, Atop an Underwood, as "'in the Saroyan-Hemingway-Wolfe style'" (Ibid., p. 91).

For a comparison of Kerouac's The Town and the City with Saroyan's The Human Comedy, see Nicosia's analysis on pp. 303-304 in Memory Babe.

In his most famous book, On The Road, Jack gives a shout-out to Saroyan:

He drove me into buzzing Fresno and let me off by the south side of town. I went for a quick Coke in a little grocery by the tracks, and here came a melancholy Armenian youth along the red boxcars, and just at that moment a locomotive howled, and I said to myself, Yes, yes, Saroyan's town. (Penguin, 1976, p. 80)

Jack knew that in William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, Ithaca, CA is based on Saroyan’s  hometown of Fresno. I note that Jack mirrors this practice of masking actual geographical place names in much of his work.

For more from Jack's own words, one need only look to the biography he wrote for Grove Press editor Don Allen to use in an upcoming publication (in a letter dated October 1, 1959):

At 18 I read Hemingway and Saroyan and began writing little terse short stories in that general style. (Jack Kerouac Selected Letters, Penguin, 1999, p. 248) 

That is the only Saroyan reference in the index of that particular volume of letters, but in Jack Kerouac Selected Letters 1940-1956, the index includes 5 separate references. I will let you dig those out on your own.

It is clear that Saroyan influenced Kerouac. With that knowledge in mind, the true Kerouac aficionado will check out Saroyan works like The Human Comedy in order to understand the origins of Jack's writing style.

Reading what Kerouac read is a very Kerouacian thing to do.