Bill McDevitt was an eccentric bookstore owner whose shop opened in 1918. McDevitt was a Socialist leader, which might have appealed to Saroyan’s ideology at the time, though Saroyan was never an activist. This is mentioned in Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang In Forever (p. 65): “Bill McDevitt owned a big shambling cluttered bookstore in San Francisco on Sutter Street above Fillmore, and I used to go in there and browse, because print and publication, paper and binding, title page and margin, and all the rest of the business and reality of language in action has always seemed near to where I ought to be, something like my home, and my way.”