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Saroyan, William
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William Saroyan | |
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 Saroyan in the 1970s | |
| Born | August 31, 1908 Fresno, California, U.S. |
| Died | May 18, 1981 (aged 72) Fresno, California, U.S. |
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| Period | 1934–1981 |
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| Spouse |
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| Children | |
| Relatives | Strawberry Saroyan (granddaughter) Ross Bagdasarian (cousin) Ross Bagdasarian Jr. (first cousin once removed) |
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"Try as much as possible to be wholly alive, with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell, and when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough." (06/04/2025)
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William Saroyan (born Aug. 31, 1908, Fresno, Calif., U.S.—died May 18, 1981, Fresno) was a U.S. writer who made his initial impact during the Depression with a deluge of brash, original, and irreverent stories celebrating the joy of living in spite of poverty, hunger, and insecurity.
The son of an Armenian immigrant, Saroyan left school at 15 and educated himself by reading and writing. His first collection of stories, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), was soon followed by another collection, Inhale and Exhale (1936). His first play, My Heart’s in the Highlands, was brilliantly produced by the Group Theatre in 1939. In 1940 Saroyan refused the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life (performed 1939) on the grounds that it was “no more great or good” than anything else he had written.
Saroyan was concerned with the basic goodness of all people, especially the obscure and naive, and the value of life. His mastery of the vernacular makes his characters vibrantly alive. Most of his stories are based on his childhood and family, notably the collection My Name Is Aram (1940) and the novel The Human Comedy (1943). His novels, such as Rock Wagram (1951) and The Laughing Matter (1953), were inspired by his own experiences of marriage, fatherhood, and divorce.
From 1958 on, Saroyan lived mostly in Paris for “tax purposes,” though he continued to maintain a home in Fresno, Calif., where he had been born and raised. The autobiographical element was strong in all his work, usually disguised as fiction; but some of his later memoirs, consisting of vignettes and brief essays written largely in Paris and Fresno, have their own enduring value. They include Here Comes, There Goes You Know Who (1961), Not Dying (1963), Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon (1971), and Places Where I’ve Done Time (1975).
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William Saroyan[2] (/səˈrɔɪən/; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an American novelist, playwright, and short story writer of Armenian descent. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, The Human Comedy.
Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California. Many of his stories and plays are set in his native Fresno.[3] Some of his best-known works are The Time of Your Life, My Name Is Aram and My Heart's in the Highlands. His two collections of short stories from the 1930s, Inhale Exhale (1936) and The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), are regarded as among his major achievements and essential documents of the cultural history of the period on the West Coast of the United States.
He has been described in a Dickinson College news release as "one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century"[4] and by Stephen Fry as "one of the most underrated writers of the [20th] century." Fry suggests that "he takes his place naturally alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner".[5] Kurt Vonnegut has said that Saroyan was "the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists."[6]
Biography
Early years
William Saroyan (Armenian: Վիլյամ Սարոյան) was born on August 31, 1908, in Fresno, California, to Armenak and Takuhi Saroyan, Armenian immigrants from Bitlis, Ottoman Empire. His father came to New York in 1905 and started preaching in Armenian Apostolic churches.[7] His cousin was musician Ross Bagdasarian.[8]
At the age of three, after his father's death, Saroyan, along with his brother and sister, was placed in an orphanage in Oakland, California.[9] He later went on to describe his experience in the orphanage in his writings.[10] Five years later, the family reunited in Fresno, where his mother, Takuhi, had already secured work at a cannery.[11] He continued his education on his own, supporting himself with jobs, such as working as an office manager for the San Francisco Telegraph Company.[12]
Saroyan decided to become a writer after his mother showed him some of his father's writings. A few of his early short articles were published in Overland Monthly. His first stories appeared at the end of the 1920s. Among these was "The Broken Wheel", written under the name Sirak Goryan and published in the Armenian journal Hairenik in 1933. Many of Saroyan's stories were based on his childhood experiences among the Armenian-American fruit growers of the San Joaquin Valley or dealt with the rootlessness of the immigrant. The short story collection My Name is Aram (1940), an international bestseller, was about a young boy and the colorful characters of his immigrant family. It has been translated into many languages.
Career
 | This section may contain original research. (January 2026) |
As a writer, Saroyan made his breakthrough in Story magazine with "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1934), the title taken from the nineteenth-century song of the same title. The protagonist — a young, starving writer who tries to survive in a Depression-ridden society — resembles the penniless writer in Knut Hamsun's 1890 novel Hunger, but lacks the anger and nihilism of Hamsun's narrator.
The story was republished in the 1941 short story collection that took its title. The royalties from this enabled Saroyan to travel to Europe and Armenia, where he learned to love the taste of Russian cigarettes, once observing, "You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself" (from Not Dying, 1963). His advice to a young writer was: "Try to learn to breathe deeply; really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell." Saroyan endeavored to create a prose style full of zest for life and seemingly impressionistic, that came to be called "Saroyanesque".
Saroyan's stories of the period characteristically devote an unvarnished attention to the trials and tribulation, social malaise and despair of the Depression. He worked rapidly, hardly editing his text, and drinking and gambling away much of his earnings.
— from Here Comes There Goes You Know Who, 1961
Saroyan published essays and memoirs, in which he depicted the people he had met on travels in the Soviet Union and Europe, such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, and Charlie Chaplin. In 1952, Saroyan published The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, the first of several volumes of memoirs. Several other works were drawn from his own experiences, although his approach to autobiographical fact contained a fair bit of poetic license. Drawn from such deeply personal sources, Saroyan's plays often disregarded the convention that conflict is essential to drama. My Heart's in the Highlands (1939), his first play, a comedy about a young boy and his Armenian family, was produced at the Guild Theatre in New York. He is probably best remembered for his play The Time of Your Life (1939), set in a waterfront saloon in San Francisco. It won a Pulitzer Prize, which Saroyan refused on the grounds that commerce should not judge the arts; he did accept the New York Drama Critics' Circle award. The play was adapted into a 1948 film starring James Cagney.
Before the war, Saroyan had worked on the screenplay of Golden Boy (1939), based on Clifford Odets's play, but he never had much success in Hollywood. A second screenplay, The Human Comedy (1943) is set in the fictional California town of Ithaca in the San Joaquin Valley (based on Saroyan's memories of Fresno, California), where young telegraph messenger Homer bears witness to the sorrows and joys of life during World War II.
— from The Human Comedy
Having hired Saroyan to write the MGM screenplay, Louis B. Mayer balked at its length, but Saroyan would not compromise and was removed from directing the project. He then turned the script into a novel, publishing it just prior to the release of the film, for which he won the 1943 Academy Award for Best Story. The novel is often credited as the source for the movie, when in fact the reverse is true. The novel was itself the basis for a 1983 musical of the same name. After his disappointment with the Human Comedy film project, he never permitted Hollywood screen adaptations of any of his novels, despite his often dire financial straits.
Saroyan served in the U.S. Army during World War II and was stationed in Astoria, Queens, spending much of his time at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan, far from Army personnel. In 1942, he was posted to London as part of a Signal Corps film unit.[13] He narrowly avoided a court martial when his novel, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, was seen as advocating pacifism. Interest in Saroyan's novels declined after the war, when he was criticized for sentimentality. Freedom, brotherly love, and universal benevolence were for him basic values, but critics considered his idealism as out of step with the times which, in their view, were properly described as devoted to division, ethnic and ideological hatred, and universal predation. He still wrote prolifically, so that one of his readers could ask "How could you write so much good stuff and still write such bad stuff?" In the novellas The Assyrian and other stories (1950) and in The Laughing Matter (1953), Saroyan mixed allegorical elements within a realistic novel. The plays Sam Ego's House (1949) and The Slaughter of the Innocents (1958) were not as successful as his prewar plays. Many of Saroyan's later plays, such as The Paris Comedy (1960), The London Comedy (1960), and Settled Out of Court (1960), premiered in Europe. Manuscripts of a number of unperformed plays are now at Stanford University with his other papers.
When Ernest Hemingway learned that Saroyan had made fun of the controversial non-fiction work Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway responded: "We've seen them come and go — good ones too, better ones than you, Mr. Saroyan."
One of Saroyan's most financially successful ventures was perhaps his most unlikely: the song "Come On-a My House," which became a huge hit in 1951 for singer Rosemary Clooney.[14] Saroyan wrote the song in 1939 with his cousin Ross Bagdasarian (who later became famous as "David Seville," the impresario behind Alvin and the Chipmunks), adapting the music from an Armenian folk song.[15]
Saroyan also painted.[16] He said: "I made drawings before I learned how to write. The impulse to do so seems basic — it is both the invention and the use of language."[17] His abstract expressionist works were exhibited by the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City.[16][18][19][20][21] From 1958 on, William Saroyan mainly resided in a Paris apartment. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Saroyan earned more money and finally got out of debt. In 1979, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.[22] The Indian educational board CBSE has added a chapter of his in the grade 11 English book Snapshots named "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" in his honour.
Personal life
Saroyan had a correspondence with writer Sanora Babb that began in 1932 and ended in 1941, that grew into an unrequited love affair on Saroyan's part.[23]
In 1943, Saroyan married actress Carol Grace (1924–2003; also known as Carol Marcus), with whom he had two children: Aram, who became an author and published a book about his father, and Lucy, who became an actress.[24] By the late 1940s, Saroyan's drinking and gambling took a toll on his marriage, and in 1949, upon returning from an extended European trip, he filed for divorce. They remarried in 1951 and divorced again in 1952 with Marcus later claiming in her autobiography, Among the Porcupines: A Memoir,[25][26] that Saroyan was abusive. After her divorce from Saroyan, Carol Grace (Marcus) married actor Walter Matthau in 1959, and they remained married until his death in 2000.
Death
Saroyan died in Fresno, of prostate cancer at the age of 72.[27][28] Half of his ashes were buried in Ararat Cemetery in Fresno, California, and the remainder in Armenia at the Komitas Pantheon near fellow artists such as composer Aram Khachaturian, painter Martiros Saryan, and film director Sergei Parajanov.[29]
Commemoration
In 2008, a monument[30] was erected in honor of Saroyan in Mashtots Avenue in Yerevan (sculptor David Yerevantsi, architects Ruben Asratyan and Levon Igityan).
In 2014, the city council of Bitlis approved the renaming of five streets in the historical part of the city in Southeast Turkey. One of the 5 streets was renamed to “William Saroyan Street”.[31] In 2015 several libraries were opened in honor of William Saroyan in the city of Bitlis, Turkey.[32]
On August 31, 2018, the William Saroyan House Museum was opened in the house where Saroyan lived for the last 17 years of his life,[33] in the city of Fresno.[34][35] The house presents photographs from different periods of his life, drawings, and covers of his books. The museum has a separate room which features a hologram of the writer.[36]
In 1991, the United States[37] and the Soviet Union[38] (series "Joint issue of USSR and USA. William Saroyan") issued stamps depicting William Saroyan.
The Central Bank of Armenia issued a 10,000 Dram coin (100th Birth anniversary of novelist William Saroyan) in 2008[39] and a 5,000 Dram banknote in 2018.[40]
In October 1988, a small alley in San Francisco across from City Lights Bookstore named Adler Place, was renamed William Saroyan Place in Saroyan's honor.[41] Championed by City Lights owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the naming (along with the renaming of its twin alley across the street to "Jack Kerouac Alley") was commemorated with a gala.
In Los Angeles, there are a series of stairs in the Hollywoodland neighborhood, one of which is named the Saroyan Stairs.[42] Saroyan used to live in the nearby Villa Carlotta.[43]
Awards
In 1940, William Saroyan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life,[44] but he refused the award.
In 1943, William Saroyan received the Academy Award for his screenplay for The Human Comedy,[45] a screenplay he adapted into a novel that was published just prior to the release of the film.
The 2013 Parajanov-Vartanov Institute Award posthumously honored Saroyan for the play The Time of Your Life and the novel Human Comedy. It was presented to his granddaughter by Academy Award-winning Hollywood actor Jon Voight.[46][47][48]
Bibliography
Novels
- The Human Comedy (1943)
- The Adventures of Wesley Jackson (1946)
- Rock Wagram (1951)
- Tracy's Tiger (1952)
- The Laughing Matter (1953); reprinted as A Secret Story (1954)
- Mama, I Love You (1956)
- Papa, You're Crazy (1957)
- Boys and Girls Together (1963)
- One Day in the Afternoon of the World (1964)
Short story collections
- The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934)
- Inhale & Exhale (1936)
- Three Times Three (1936)
- Little Children (1937)
- A Native American (1938)
- Love, Here Is My Hat (1938)
- The Trouble with Tigers (1938)
- Peace, It's Wonderful (1939)
- My Name Is Aram (1940)
- Saroyan's Fables (1941)
- Dear Baby (1944)
- The Assyrian and Other Stories (1951)
- The Whole Voyald and Other Stories (1956)
- Letters from 74 rue Taitbout, or Don’t Go, But If You Must, Say Hello to Everybody (1969)
- Madness in the Family (1988)
Plays
- The Time of Your Life (1939) – winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama
- My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
- Elmer and Lily (1939)
- Three plays (1940):
- My Heart's in the Highlands
- The Time of Your Life
- Love's Old Sweet Song
- Love's Old Sweet Song[49] (1940)
- The Agony of Little Nations (1940)
- Subway Circus (1940)
- Hello Out There (1941)
- Across the Board on Tomorrow Morning (1941)
- The Beautiful People (1941)
- Bad Men in the West (1942)
- Talking to You (1942)
- Coming Through the Rye (1942)
- Don't Go Away Mad (1947)
- Jim Dandy (1947)
- The Slaughter of the Innocents (1952)
- The Oyster and the Pearl (Television Play) (1953)
- The Stolen Secret (1954)
- A Midsummer Daydream (Television Play) (1955)
- The Cave Dwellers (1958)
- Sam, The Highest Jumper Of Them All, or the London Comedy (1960)
- Settled Out of Court (1960)
- Hanging around the Wabash (1961)
- The Dogs, or the Paris Comedy (1969)
- Armenian (1971)
- Assassinations (1974)
- Tales from the Vienna Streets (1980)
- An Armenian Trilogy (1986)
- The Parsley Garden (1992)
Memoirs, essays and other writings
- Hilltop Russians in San Francisco (1941)
- The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills (1952)
- Here Comes, There Goes, You Know Who (1961)
- Me: A Modern Masters Book for Children (1963), illustrated by Murray Tinkelman[50]
- Not Dying (1963)
- Short Drive, Sweet Chariot (1966)
- Days of Life and Death and Escape to the Moon (1970)
- Places Where I’ve Done Time (1972)
- Sons Come and Go, Mothers Hang In Forever (1976)
- Chance Meetings (1978)
- Obituaries (1979)
- Births (1983)
Short stories
- "The Snake"
- "An Ornery Kind of Kid"
- "The Filipino and the Drunkard"
- "Gaston" (date unknown)
- "The Hummingbird That Lived Through Winter"
- "Knife-Like, Flower-Like, Like Nothing At All in the World" (1942)
- "The Mourner"
- "The Parsley Garden"
- "The Summer of the Beautiful White Horse" (1938)
- "Seventy Thousand Assyrians" Archived January 8, 2015, at the Wayback Machine (1934)
- "The Shepherd's Daughter"
- "Sweetheart Sweetheart Sweetheart"
- "Third day after Christmas" (1926)
- "Five Ripe Pears" (1935)
- "Pomegranate Trees" (year unknown)
- "Seventeen" (written during the Great Depression, in the collection of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories)
- "The Barber´s Uncle"
Anthologies
- The Gay and Melancholy Flux (Faber, 1938)
- 48 Saroyan Stories (Avon, 1942)
- Best Stories of William Saroyan (Faber, 1945)
- The Saroyan Special: Selected Short Stories (Harcourt Brace, 1948)
- Love (Lion Library, 1955)
- The William Saroyan Reader (Braziller, 1958; Barricade, 1994)
- I Used to Believe I Had Forever, Now I'm Not So Sure (Cowles, 1968)
- The Man with the Heart in the Highlands and Other Stories (Dell, 1968)
- My Name Is Saroyan (Coward-McCann, 1983)
- Saroyan: The New Saroyan Reader (Donald S. Ellis, 1984)
- The Man with the Heart in the Highlands and Other Early Stories (New Directions, 1989)
- Fresno Stories (New Directions, 1994)
- Essential Saroyan (Heyday, 2005)
Poem
- "Me" (The Saturday Evening Post, March 9, 1963, illustrated by Murray Tinkelman)[51]
Song
- "Come On-a My House", a hit for Rosemary Clooney, based on an Armenian folk song, written with his cousin, Ross Bagdasarian, later the impresario of Alvin and the Chipmunks.[52]
- "Eat, Eat, Eat" (words and music) sung by Danny Kaye with the Vic Schoen Orchestra[53][54]
References
- Specific
- "Relative to William Saroyan Year". Official California Legislative Information. March 13, 2008. Retrieved February 2, 2014.
Half of his ashes were buried in the Ararat Cemetery in Fresno and the remaining was interred in Yerevan, Armenia
- Armenian: Վիլեամ Սարոյեան in classical orthography and Վիլյամ Սարոյան in reformed orthography
- "William Saroyan Is Dead At 72; Wrote 'The Time of Your Life'". The New York Times. May 19, 1981. Retrieved February 1, 2014.
- "One-Man Show Tells Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author's Story". Dickinson College. September 2, 2001. Archived from the original on December 27, 2013. Retrieved December 26, 2013.
- 2013 Parajanov-Vartanov Institute Awards
- Quotes by Stephen Fry, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams
- Hamalian 1987, p. 23.
- https://armenianweekly.com/2022/04/20/brothers-from-bitlis-how-the-bond-of-genocide-made-william-saroyan-part-of-my-family/
- "Saroyan Overview". home.uchicago.edu. Retrieved January 16, 2024.
- "Saroyan Overview". home.uchicago.edu. Retrieved January 16, 2024.
- "Saroyan Overview". home.uchicago.edu. Retrieved January 16, 2024.
- "Saroyan Overview". home.uchicago.edu. Retrieved January 16, 2024.
- William Saroyan Dies at 72 The Washington Post. Retrieved January 17, 2024.
- "Come On-a My House". Life. July 16, 1951. p. 34.
- Lee, Lawrence, & Gifford, Barry (1998). Saroyan: A Biography. University of California Press. p. 252. ISBN 0520213998.
- "William Saroyan". Anita Shapolsky Gallery NYC. Archived from the original on April 19, 2015. Retrieved March 21, 2015.
- Nolte, Carl (September 4, 2008). "S.F. gathering celebrates Saroyan's centennial; Living, working and carousing in San Francisco, Fresno-born author chronicled the human comedy". SFGate.
- "The Expressive Edge of Paper". The Huffington Post. March 18, 2014.
- Gallery, Anita Shapolsky (1997). In Celebration of the Exhibition, The Writer as Artist: Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Saroyan.
{{cite book}}:|work=ignored (help) - "The Writer's Brush; September 11th – October 27th, 2007". Anita Shapolsky Gallery NYC. Archived from the original on February 1, 2015.
- "Volume 19, Issues 6–8". Art & Auction Magazine. 1997.
- "Theater Hall of Fame Enshrines 51 Artists" (PDF). www.nytimes.com.
- Balakian, Nona (1998). The World of William Saroyan (2. print. ed.). Lewisburg, [Pa.]: Bucknell University Press. pp. 273–275. ISBN 978-0-8387-5368-2.
I have never stopped thinking of you as somebody rare and extraordinary and fine and wonderful and truly beautiful.
- Saroyan, Aram (1982). Last Rites: The Death of William Saroyan (First ed.). New York: William Morrow & Co. ISBN 978-0-688-01262-5.
- Matthau, Carol (1992). Among the Porcupines: A Memoir (First ed.). New York: Turtle Bay Books. ISBN 0-394-58266-7.
- Witchel, Alex (July 19, 1992). "The Real Holly Golightly". The New York Times. Retrieved December 15, 2008.
- Saroyan, Aram (1982). Last Rites: The Death of William Saroyan (First ed.). New York: William Morrow & Co. ISBN 978-0-688-01262-5.
- "William Saroyan Is Dead At 72; Wrote 'The Time of Your Life'". The New York Times. May 19, 1981. Retrieved February 1, 2014.
- "saroyan". February 9, 2017.
- "William Saroyan monument in Yerevan". Archived from the original on January 10, 2019. Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- "In Bitlis William Saroyan street will appear". August 22, 2014. Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- "In Bitlis a library will be opened named after William Saroyan". February 20, 2015. Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- Panoo, Ashleigh (August 31, 2018). "William Saroyan House Museum opens in central Fresno". The Fresno Bee. Retrieved September 23, 2020.
- "In the USA a Historic house museum will be opened". Archived from the original on July 1, 2019. Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- "William Saroyan's estate will be turned into a Historic house museum in Fresno". Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- Hawkins, Stephen (August 31, 2018). "Jim previews the William Saroyan House Museum". KMPH-TV. Retrieved September 23, 2020.
- "William Saroyan (1908-1981), Author, face value of 29 cents". Colnect. Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- "William Saroyan (1908-1981), Author, face value of 1 Russian ruble". Colnect. Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- "10,000 Dram (100th Birth anniversary of novelist William Saroyan)". Colnect. Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- "5,000 Dram, 2018". Colnect. Retrieved December 29, 2019.
- Weidman, Rich (September 1, 2015). The Beat Generation FAQ: All That's Left to Know About the Angelheaded Hipsters. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 978-1-61713-635-1.
- "Discover the Hidden Stairs of Los Angeles | Discover Los Angeles".
- "Villa Carlotta Historical Marker".
- "William Saroyan Pulitzer Prize". www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved September 20, 2022.
- "Browser Unsupported - Academy Awards Search | Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences". awardsdatabase.oscars.org. Retrieved September 20, 2022.
- "Parajanov-Vartanov Institute - Official site". Parajanov-Vartanov Institute. Archived from the original on April 24, 2015.
- "DOC LA — Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival — Hollywood". DOC LA — Los Angeles Documentary Film Festival — Hollywood.
- "Parajanov-Vartanov Institute Awards (2013)". IMDb.
- Saroyan, William (1940). Love's Old Sweet Song: A Play in Three Acts. Samuel French. p. 72. Retrieved July 15, 2017.
- Me: A Modern Masters Book For Children: William Saroyan, Murray Tinkelman: Amazon.com: Books. The Crowell-Collier Press. January 1963.
- "Catalog of Copyright Entries. Third Series". google.com. 1973.
- Severo, Richard (August 2, 2010). "Mitch Miller, Maestro of the Singalong, Dies at 99". The New York Times.
- Billboard 3 Nov 1951. p.49. Billboard.
- Decca matrix L 6451. Eat, eat, eat! / Danny Kaye. Discography of American Historical Recordings.
- General
- Hamalian, Leo (1987). William Saroyan: the man and the writer remembered. Rutherford, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 9780838633083.
- Saroyan: His Heart In The Highlands Archived February 1, 2015, at the Wayback Machine (2008)
Further reading
- Balakian, N., 1998. The World of William Saroyan.
- Floan, H. R., 1966. William Saroyan.
- Foster, E. H., 1984. William Saroyan.
- Foster, E. H., 1991. William Saroyan: A Study in the Shorter Fiction.
- Gifford, Barry, and Lee, Lawrence, 1984. Saroyan.
- Hamalian, Leo, ed. (1987). William Saroyan: The Man and the Writer Remembered. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 9780838633083.
- Keyishan, H., 1995. Critical Essays in William Saroyan.
- Leggett, John, 2002. A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan.
- Linde, Mauricio D. Aguilera, 2002, "Saroyan and the Dream of Success: The American Vaudeville as a Political Weapon," 11.1 (Winter): 18–31.
- Linde, Mauricio D. 2016. "Saroyan’s Travel Memories: Contesting National Identities for Armenian-Americans". Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik.A Quarterly of Language, Literature and Culture.64(4), pp. 415–429.
- Radavich, David. "War of the Wests: Saroyan's Dramatic Landscape." American Drama 9:2 (Spring 2000): 29–49.
- Samuelian, Varaz, 1985. Willie & Varaz: Memories of My Friend William Saroyan.
- Whitmore, Jon, 1995. William Saroyan.
- Hunter, Pat; Stevens, Janice (2008). William Saroyan: Places in Time. Fresno: Craven Street Books. ISBN 9781933502243.
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Here are some notable quotes by William Saroyan:
- "When you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough."
- "In the time of your life, live—so that in that good time there shall be no ugliness or death for yourself or for any life your life touches."
- "I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race of mine, for if we are to be destroyed, we will destroy ourselves."
- "The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision."
- "I have a great deal of trouble with my life, but I have a great deal of fun with it too."
These quotes reflect Saroyan's unique perspective on life, humor, and the human experience.
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WILLIAM SAROYAN IS DEAD AT 72
WILLIAM SAROYAN IS DEAD AT 72; WROTE 'THE TIME OF YOUR LIFE'
William Saroyan, whose plays, short stories and novels drew on the Armenian immigrant experience and depicted the variety and romance of American life, died of cancer yesterday at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Fresno, Calif. He was 72 years old.
Sounding like a character in one of his autobiographical short stories, Mr. Saroyan called The Associated Press five days before his death to leave a posthumous statement: ''Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?''
His book ''The Human Comedy'' included another characteristic example of his freewheeling philosophy: ''Every man in the world is better than someone else. And not as good as someone else.''
Mr. Saroyan soared into the American consciousness in early 1934 with ''The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.'' For the next decade, he dazzled, entertained and uplifted millions with hundreds of short stories and a series of plays: ''My Heart's in the Highlands,'' ''The Time of Your Life,'' ''Love's Old Sweet Song'' and ''The Beautiful People.'' Spurned Pulitzer Prize
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He also rejected a Pulitzer Prize for ''The Time of Your Life'' and publicly broke with Hollywood, seeking to buy back from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer the scenario for ''The Human Comedy'' -which turned out to be a hit when it appeared in 1943.
He never stopped writing at a phenomenal pace - short stories, novels, plays, memoirs. By his own decision, much of this work remains unpublished, and few of the new plays have been performed.
After World War II, Mr. Saroyan fell out of critical fashion. An unhappy marriage, drinking, tax trouble and an obsession with gambling sent him into self-imposed exile. Yet his work continued to be read around the world; a song, ''C'mon-a My House,'' made a hit by Rosemary Clooney, helped revive his popularity, and gradually critics began to reassess his work.
His spectacular rise and fall were seen as a result, in part, of historical circumstance: Having grown up in poverty and hardship, Mr. Saroyan saw nothing abnormal about the Depression. His message of the disinherited rising above adversity with humor and courage gave heart to many who had once known prosperity.
After the war, expansion seemed endless and poverty ephemeral. Academia had now turned to formalism, and in the arts, Representation gave way to Abstract Expressionism. The primitive, sentimental Saroyan seemed old hat. Later the postwar optimism faded, a return to naturalism set in and critics returned to Mr. Saroyan with new respect. Mystery of Genius and Personality
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That was part of the story. The rest lies in the mystery of his genius and his personality, that of an orphan hurt by a sense of rejection, craving love and bursting with talent.
A reader of the early Saroyan stories, like readers of ''Tom Sawyer,'' might well assume that the author had had a happy childhood. One could not be more mistaken.
William Saroyan was born in Fresno, Calif., on Aug. 31, 1908, the fourth child of Armenak and Takoohi Saroyan, recent refugees from the Turkish massacres in Armenia. The father, a poor farmer and Presbyterian preacher who was something of a poet, died three years later and the mother placed the children in an orphanage in San Jose, Calif., while she took up menial work in San Francisco. Ran Away to Seek Mother
It was not until an advanced age that the author freely recalled the experience. It was not, as he described it, an unkindly home but, he said, ''I believe I hated the place more than anybody else who was there.''
He was struck by the ''ease'' of a neighborhood boy who had invited him home, ''because our boys didn't have ease.'' William ran away to seek his mother at the age of 5, but was brought back.
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The family was reunited in Fresno when he was 8. He attended the public schools, sold newspapers and haunted the library. Then, as always, he was an indiscriminate reader. According to his memoirs, in his early teens he learned from Maupassant that he would be a writer, and switched schools to learn typing; from Sherwood Anderson he learned that ''what is under your nose, that is your subject.'' Unafraid of Being Laughed At
''My own natural folly permitted me never to fear being laughed at,'' he wrote. ''And I didn't know any better than not to take risks likely to prohibit editorial acceptance and consequent fame and fortune - spurious and unnecessary.''
While reading H.L. Mencken, he recalled, he once broke the library calm with loud laughter. It was a Saroyan hallmark: he was frequently ejected from class for guffawing, was removed under guard from a San Francisco courtroom and, to his puzzlement, was shushed by an usher at a performance of James Thurber's ''The Male Animal.''
Dark, thin and hawklike when he was young, peasant-stocky and heavily mustached in later years, Mr. Saroyan dominated all groups, everywhere, with his huge bass voice and his booming laugh. He explained that he came from an ancient tradition of Armenian singers and storytellers - ''If I talk too much, it's a cultural problem.'' Bright but Rebellious
A bright but rebellious student, he dropped out of high school before graduation, quit his job as a telegraph messenger and in 1926 moved to San Francisco, where he became a clerk, operator and office manager for Postal Telegraph, the old rival of Western Union.
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On the strength of a story published in a western magazine, he went to New York in 1928 to knock at publishers' doors, but returned discouraged. It was not until 1933 that his next story appeared, in an English-language Armenian journal.
Then in February 1934, Whit Burnett and Martha Foley published ''The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze'' in their magazine, Story. A childlike, sentimental fable of a young writer starving to death in gallant obscurity, it aroused a warm and wide response. A star was born. Instant Best Seller
With blazing speed, Mr. Saroyan poured out new work faster than Story and half a dozen other magazines could publish it. By that October, his first book of stories appeared under the ''Daring Young Man'' title. It was an instant best seller, and he became one of the most acclaimed new writers of the day.
Five more collections appeared from 1936 through 1938. Most of the stories were about the disinherited around Fresno and in San Francisco, and many were about children, finding life, love and dignity in a harsh world.
It is notable that, although the characters in the earliest stories bore Anglo-American names, by the second volume the immigrant factor became specific. Mr. Saroyan dedicated it to ''the English tongue, the American earth and the Armenian spirit.'' Mistrusted All Authority
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Although he identified with the poor and despised the rich, Mr. Saroyan, unlike other so-called proletarian writers of the 30's, was never a Marxist. Describing himself as an anarchist, he mistrusted all authority, including Communist authority.
A drunken protagonist in one of his 1936 stories tells a group of Communists: ''What good will it do when everybody has everything? Everything isn't enough, brothers, even the living are dead, and you can't do anything about it.''
Living high on his new wealth, Mr. Saroyan traveled to the Soviet Union in 1935, mainly to visit Armenia. He did not find the new society different from the old one. During the trip, he would set aside an hour each morning to write another short story. 'Hit-and-Run Writer'
His speed and apparent ease of output stirred some critical misgivings. In a 1936 review, The New Yorker called him ''the greatest hit-and-run writer in the history of American letters.'' Long afterward, he commented that he had written a novel in 38 days because he was organized to write a novel in 38 days, but that did not mean it was easy.
His most famous exploit in celerity was his writing ''The Time of Your Life'' in six days at the Great Northern Hotel in New York. It was neither his first nor his fastest-written play, but it clinched his status as an important playwright. The first play came in 1935. Mr. Saroyan said that while passing through New York he had read in The New York Times that he was working on a play. In order to save the newspaper from error, he said, he spent five days writing ''Subway Circus.'' On Stage by 1939
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''Subway Circus'' was never staged. But in early 1939, the Group Theater put on an experimental showing of his ''My Heart's in the Highlands.'' Adapted from a short story and spun around an old character with a bugle blowing life into a poor community, it drew enough praise to warrant an extended run.
''The Time of Your Life'' opened that October and immediately entered the repertory of major American plays. Set in a San Francisco waterfront bar, it offered a rich cast of eccentrics: the weary, cultured idealist, the old hobo-cowboy fabulist, the whore with a heart of gold, a hoofer, a singer and a pianist. There is much humor, a touch of menace, a refrain of despair - ''No foundation. All the way down the line.'' - and a happy ending.
The play was the New York critics' choice as best of the season, and won a Pulitzer Prize. But the playwright rejected the prize and the $1,000 that went with it, on the ground that businessmen were not qualified to judge art. He did not think highly of critics either. Nor of producers and directors. Insisted on Directing Own Work
Mr. Saroyan saw ''The Time of Your Life'' in rehearsal in New Haven, dismissed the director and some ''Stanislavski-method'' actors and brought it to Broadway completely restaged. From then on, he insisted on directing his own work as much as possible, and on financing it as well.
''The director is a conductor, not a composer, but there are few directors who are willing to accept this fact,'' he wrote. Interviewed during the run of ''Time of Your Life,'' he observed: ''You can't just say I wrote this play in six days and let it go at that. It really means six days - and 30 years.'' To the objection that his plot lacked form he responded: ''Most writers strain too hard to produce, especially in the movies. Since all art consists of capturing and presenting a section of life, why should characters and plots be forced?'' A Box-Office Failure
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Mr. Saroyan's third play, ''Love's Old Sweet Song'' in 1940, failed in the view of most critics and at the box office. He insisted it was ''one of the best plays in the American theater,'' and berated audience and critics alike.
His fourth, ''The Beautiful People'' the next year, a comedy about a ne'er-do-well family, drew good reviews, but the playwright voiced contempt for the plaudits and offered money back at the box office for any dissatisfied customer.
Few took him up. The play earned back its investment and showed a profit, for a time. But Mr. Saroyan deliberately kept it running until his investment was gone. In this he seemed to reveal a quality that many friends discerned in his growing passion for gambling: an urge to get rid of money. Never Far Enough Ahead
Mr. Saroyan himself once said he never quit a winner because he was never far enough ahead. Another time, he argued that ''betting on the horse races gives the playwright the contempt for money which money must have in order for him to go about his work of writing plays in a free, proud, indifferent and sensible manner.''
He worked as a salaried writer in Hollywood in 1936, but found that he could not write to order. In 1941, he returned to write ''The Human Comedy'' for M-G-M. Refusing a salary, he sold the script to the studio for $60,000. Then he demanded to produce and direct it. To prove that he could, he made a movie short. Then he offered to buy back the scenario for $80,000.
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The studio refused. Mr. Saroyan denounced it and Hollywood in a trade paper. The movie - which starred Mickey Rooney as a telegraph messenger in a sweet little town delivering, among other things, the death notices of G.I.'s -became a hit. Remorseful About Scenario
In later years, the author expressed remorse about the scenario and the novel that he fashioned from it. ''I inserted patriotic hysteria in it without criticism,'' he said.
The year 1943, when ''The Human Comedy'' was screened, marked the beginning of the writer's despondency. He married Carol Marcus, a debutante actress and the daughter of a business executive, and he was drafted into the Army.
Incapable of writing to order, Private Saroyan hated the service. It seems to have been moderately tolerant of its famous ward. He was allowed by his film unit in London to hole up in the Savoy Hotel for 38 days to write a novel, ''The Adventures of Wesley Jackson.''
A picaresque tale about a soldier, it turned out to be too hostile toward the Army brass and too friendly toward the enemy, and publication was delayed until 1946.
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''The book was anti-dishonesty and only incidentally anti-war,'' the author wrote in a memoir. ''It was more pro the enemy than anti, for the simple reason that the very term enemy is dishonest.''
He said the Army had welshed on a promise to give him home leave when he finished the novel, and he ''went berserk.'' But many other things began going wrong. By the time of his discharge from the Army in 1945, he had stopped offering his plays for production.
From time to time, he published some new stories and some novels, but none was particularly well received. 'Unremitting Chicken'
''After the war,'' he wrote recently, ''all I had was a condition of simple madness, the consequence of having been for three years subjected to unremitting chicken.'' And again: ''Three years in the Army and a stupid marriage had all but knocked me out of the picture and, if the truth is told, out of life itself.''
''Suicide was suicide, divorce was divorce,'' he wrote. ''I flipped a coin, and it came up divorce.'' This would have been in 1949, or perhaps in 1951, for the Saroyans divorced, remarried and divorced again.
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Mrs. Saroyan kept custody of the two children, Aram and Lucy. Mr. Saroyan blamed the social ambitions of his wife and his mother-inlaw, but he also had been gambling and drinking heavily. Aram is now a writer and Lucy an actress. Flayed Agents and Producers
The critical coolness toward his output was taking a toll. Mr. Saroyan, who had broken with the theater and motion-picture establishments, was not seeking allies. In a 1949 essay, he flayed the Dramatists Guild, theatrical agents, producers and financial agents. ''I'm a failure,'' he wrote, ''but the others are a bankruptcy.''
All this and his generosity toward many relatives brought him into serious financial difficulty. Owing $50,000 in income taxes, he moved to Paris in 1958 to reduce his obligations and bought a fifth-floor walk-up apartment in a working-class neighborhood.
A series of television plays improved his fortunes. Gradually he brought his gambling and drinking under control, returned to solvency, and began writing, among other things, a series of memoirs. 'I Owe Nobody Anything'
''I'm free,'' Mr. Saroyan wrote. ''That's the source of the happiness. I owe nobody anything.'' More often, however, the mood was gloomy, introspective, preoccupied with death. The memoirs are a string of vignettes and brief essays, disconnected but often taut and evocative.
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The first, ''Not Dying'' (1963), is perhaps the gloomiest, the most self-critical and the most defensive. The author remembered laughing as he was writing a short story in 1936, and added, ''But I haven't laughed once in the writing of this book.''
Listing his faults as told to him by his son and by a reader, Mr. Saroyan replied that he was still the man of his sins and his talents. ''If my work hasn't changed the world and its inhabitants for the better,'' he said, ''it also hasn't changed them for the worse.''
He continued his memoirs in Fresno, to which he returned in the late 60's, while keeping his pied-a-terre in Paris. He found the city much changed, and not for the better. It was home, but not sweet home.
''Can a society which has thrived on lies be expected to survive?'' he wrote. ''Possibly, but the people of that society can't be expected not to be grotesque.''
Ironically, the early Saroyan stories and plays - optimistic, sentimental, wistful, brave - were recovering in public esteem. This had been foreseen in a review of ''Not Dying'' by Herbert Mitgang in The New York Times: ''A hardboiled romantic, Saroyan shows that he can be more in the vanguard than many of the official literary-map personages in Esquire; that he'll be around long after this year's hipsters have become next year's squares.''
In the preface to his ''The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze,'' Mr. Saroyan set down three rules for writing: ''Do not pay any attention to the rules other people make. Forget Edgar Allan Poe and O. Henry and write the kind of stories you feel like writing. Learn to typewrite, so you can turn out stories as fast as Zane Grey.''
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