Boys and Girls Together was published by Harcourt, Brace & World in 1963. The novel is barely fictionalized autobiography: a writer (transparently Saroyan) and his beautiful wife (transparently Carol Marcus) destroy each other through incompatibility, jealousy, gambling, and the fundamental inability of an artist to live a normal domestic life.
The book is Saroyan’s angriest — gone is the warm optimism of The Human Comedy and My Name Is Aram, replaced by bitter self-examination. The writer-protagonist knows he is impossible to live with: obsessive, self-absorbed, unable to stop working even when his marriage is disintegrating. His wife is beautiful, social, and needs attention he cannot provide. Their children suffer. The marriage collapses, reconstitutes, and collapses again.
Critics found the book self-indulgent; readers who knew Saroyan only from his optimistic earlier work were shocked by its bitterness. But the honesty is valuable: Saroyan, who made his career celebrating human goodness, here acknowledges that goodness is not enough — that even people of genuine warmth can destroy each other through incompatible needs.
Collecting Boys and Girls Together
First edition (Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, 1963): Cloth boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition with jacket, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Without jacket, very good: $10–$20
Projected values (2026–2036): Modest appreciation.
Postwar Novel
Boys and Girls Together (1963) is a late Saroyan novel about a writer and his family living in Paris — another thinly autobiographical work drawn from Saroyan’s years of wandering between California, New York, and Europe after his second divorce. The novel explores the wreckage of a marriage and a writer’s attempts to maintain his creative vision in middle age. It was poorly received by critics, who found it repetitive and self-pitying, but it contains passages of genuine emotional force about the pain of failed love and the loneliness of the expatriate writer.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Saroyan’s late novels like? Increasingly autobiographical, rambling, and melancholy. The exuberance of the early work gives way to a more reflective, sometimes bitter tone. These novels are of interest primarily to Saroyan completists.