Follow and the Apprenticeship of William Saroyan Dickran Kouymjian Literary precociousness does not reveal itself with ease. The mechanics of playing the piano or drawing skillful pictures seem easier to master than written work. But, in studying his earliest efforts, it can be said that William Saroyan deserves to be considered some sort of literary child prodigy. Though he says he mastered the reading and writing later than his schoolmates, he also tells us that by age nine he had fallen in love with books and shortly after thought he, too, could write things similar to what he was reading. In later autobiographical accounts, he recounts often the electrifying effect de Maupassant's story "The Bell" had on him at age twelve or thirteen. Saroyan also mentions how at thirteen, with his first earnings as a telegram delivery boy, he bought a typewriter, so angering his mother that he claimed the purchase was intended to help him learn stenography and typing and get a job. The youngest of four children in a poor, fatherless immigrant family, he knew what he wanted to do in life before all those around him: he had a goal. Part of the preparation was establishing a clear identity independent from his family; another part was the accumulation of experience. These are common aspects of many artists’ careers. In Follow, Saroyan tells the story of this early struggle to separate himself from family and environment in order to create. Yet the reader should not be fooled. While the young writer of the story left home in his teens, the real Saroyan spent less than six months away from kith and kin, until his lightning success in 1934. In various memoirs or autobiographical writings passing as fiction, Saroyan remarked often on how he wanted to get away from home and family in Fresno. His first timid step took place in July 1926, when he was almost 18 years old. This brief trek, mentioned in Places Where I've Done Time (p. 158), was from the family’s El Monte Street house to a shed in Fresno, all for himself. He claimed to have lasted one night before returning to the family, but a few days later he set out for Los Angeles and took a room in a building behind the new Public Library there. After working three days at Bullock's, he got sick and a few days later, penniless and desperate, Saroyan joined the National Guard, serving for two weeks in Monterey for a dollar a day. He was returned to Los Angeles, where he met his uncle Mihran and returned with him to Fresno for a few days before heading north, first to Sonora by train for a job with the United States Forest Service. The following day, he fled to San Francisco by bus. In the Bay Area he worked at various jobs, most notably with the Postal Telegraph Company at two different locations, no doubt because of his experience in the company’s Fresno office. His brother Henry and the family had moved up to San Francisco in that same year. Saroyan remained there for two years until 16 August 1928, when he was almost 20 years of age. After getting permission from his mother in writing, in order to secure a loan from his Uncle Mihran, he finally set out to New York by bus via Salt Lake City, Chicago, and Cleveland, arriving in the early hours of Sunday, August 26, five days