The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse

“The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse,” a short story by William Saroyan, is part of a collection of Saroyan’s short stories called My Name is Aram, which was first published in 1940. Themes present in the story include Gentleness Versus Force, Truth and Honesty, which entails acting from one’s heart, and Duality and the Immigrant Experience, particularly in the lives of the Armenian immigrants about whom Saroyan writes.

The guide refers to the version of “The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse” published in William Saroyan’s collection of short stories, My Name is Aram, by Dover Publications, Inc. in 2013.

Aram Garoghlanian, a nine-year-old boy of Armenian descent who lives on the edge of a town in the San Joaquin Valley of California, is woken up early one morning by his older cousin Mourad, who is outside Aram’s window sitting on a beautiful white horse. Mourad invites him for a ride, which has been one of Aram’s longtime dreams. However, Aram’s extended family is desperately poor, so he doesn’t understand how Mourad got the horse. Their family also has a longstanding reputation for honesty, so Aram finds it hard to believe that Mourad would steal, though he admits to himself that Mourad must have done so.