Selected from New Directions' collections of Saroyan's early stories (The Man With the Heart In the Highlands) and his later work (Madness In the Family), Fresno Stories spans his whole remarkable career.

William Saroyan (1908-1981) was born in Fresno, California. Famous for a long and voluminous career, he wrote novels, along with some sixteen story collections, and plays including The Human Comedy (winning an Academy Award for his screenplay), and The Time of Your Life, for which he won the Drama Critics Circle and Pulitzer Prizes. He wrote about "the archetypal Armenian families who inhabit Saroyan country, in and around Fresno, California. [And yet with their] unpredictable charm and wacky spontaneity ... his characters overflow with so much human comedy that they transcend all ethnic boundaries, as in the stories of I.B. Singer" (The Chicago Tribune).