Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who, An Autobiography, William Saroyan (softcover)

This is the first volume of a multi-volume autobiography by William Saroyan. Intending to write the one-volume autobiography that he had signed a contract for, he discovered instead the final, and in certain ways the richest literary terrain of his career, the distinctly Saroyan-style memoir, which would comprise the major achievement of his two last decades as a writer.

Here is Saroyan at the top of his form setting out to tell the story of his life and discovering early on that he is not going to stick to strict chronology and is more likely to leap ahead in one paragraph, make a connection that telescopes his lifetime in the next, and yet by the end of each chapter round things out to the approximate chronology he sets out.

In superbly rendered scenes from his life as an orphan, schoolboy, newspaper-boy, messenger, fledgling writer, family misfit, world famous writer, man-about-town, husband, and father, Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who gives us the characteristic fluency of Saroyan at his best, and it introduces a new emotional depth that was to become a hallmark of the writer’s later work.