ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the impact of the Armenian massacres on narrative writing and fiction in Europe and the United States during the years between 1920 and 1980. It explores how Armenian writers themselves responded to the attempted genocide. In the young state of Soviet Armenia, there was a brilliant but short-lived renaissance in Armenian literature created by such writers as Zabel Yesayan, Marietta Shahinian, Yeghishe Charents and Gurgen Mahari. Armenian writer of the pre-World War II period is William Saroyan, whose family fled from the Lake Van area of Turkey to a small dusty village in the San Joaquin Valley, a place called Fresno, which he would soon put on the map. The young Saroyan wrote about the Armenian massacres perhaps too obliquely in "70,000 Assyrians," a story about a decimated race of people, published in his first successful collection, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.
