After graduating from Rutgers University in 1958, where he roomed with the poet Robert Pinsky, Najarian was a Social Investigator for the New York City Department of Welfare, where his caseload was in Harlem.
While in Armenia he helped to recover survivors after the earthquake, and the short work called “The Girl” in his collection "The Great American Loneliness" is about his experience there.
He contributed to the Serving House Journal of Literary Arts,[1] and to a compilation titled The Sixties,[2] edited by Peter Stine and published by Wayne State University Press.
His book recounts how these paintings were taken from him after Pinajian's death and later sold to Lawrence E. Joseph, who then hired Peter Hastings Falk to promote them.
Najarian's book also seeks to prove in the course of Pinajian's letters to him that his cousin was in fact a "most sane human being" who was a "popular and attractive and humorous man and who was out-going and socially responsible and whose isolation in his later years was only a result of his poverty."
[7] "Pete Najarian writes prose in the very particular American tradition that includes Thomas Wolfe, William Saroyan, and Jack Kerouac.