William Saroyan writes about seemingly unimportant people with great care and sensitivity. He is drawn to people made “of the stuff that is eternal in man,” who are not found in “bright places, making witty remarks about sex and trivial remarks about art. You find them where I found them. And they will be there forever, the race of man, the part of man, of Assyria as much as of England, that cannot be destroyed, the part that earthquake and war and famine and madness and everything else cannot destroy.” The part that is the dignity of a person, which Saroyan does so well to bring forward in his stories, short and long, about ordinary and generally marginalized people. 

Saroyan leaves space for the things that can’t be said.