The US author’s debut collection from 1934 focuses on impoverished individuals in precarious times using language that is punchy and full of compassion

Many of the 26 stories in William Saroyan’s 1934 debut collection – reissued this month with an introduction by Stephen Fry – take place in Depression-era San Francisco and explore the experiences of ordinary people trying to get by. California-born, the son of Armenians who fled the genocidal Ottoman empire, Saroyan draws on his own heritage. His narrators are often struggling young writers, such as the protagonist of the title story, who lives on a diet of “bread and coffee and cigarettes” and laments the lack of “weeds in the park that could be cooked”.

Despite the focus on poverty, there is an ebullience to Saroyan’s punchy prose. Take this opening to Seventy Thousand Assyrians: “I hadn’t had a haircut in 40 days and 40 nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work.” The story gets to the heart of Saroyan’s literary aspirations that echo throughout the collection – the desire to “speak a more universal language… eternal and common to all races” in order to “show the brotherhood of man”. And what better riposte to Donald Trump’s harsh border policies than Saroyan’s vivid snapshots of migrants whose harsh working conditions in vineyards and barbershops helped the US to prosper.