William saroyan family
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William Saroyan
In 1958 Saroyan headed for Europe with no clear plan. He loved traveling from one country to another. While living in Paris he wrote several plays which were very popular in Eastern Europe, especially Czechoslovakia. Diana Der Hovanessian said his work translated very well. In many European countries he is taught as one of the most significant American writers.
Saroyan visited Armenia four times from 1935 to 1978 and found himself at ease not only with the established and emerging writers but with the “man on the street”. After his first trip he had this to say: “I’m no Armenian. I’m an American. Well, the truth is I am both and neither. I love Armenia and I love America and I belong to both, but I am only this; an inhabitant of the earth, and so are you, whoever you are. I tried to forget Armenia but I couldn’t do it.” In a documentary about his life Saroyan said “My birthplace is California, but I can’t forget Armenia. I have always been an Armenian writer, only my writing is in English.”
Throughout the milestones in his life, Saroyan continued to write
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About William Saroyan
William Saroyan was born in Fresno on the last day of August 1908. Following their father’s death, William, his brother Henry, and his sisters Zabel and Cosette spent several years at the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland, while young widow Takoohi took up menial work in nearby San Francisco. The family was eventually reunited back in Fresno, in the San Joaquin Valley, and William Saroyan’s formidable maternal grandmother Lucy (also widowed), who was to be a strong influence on him, joined the household. As he grew up there, an American boy also becoming part of the exiled Armenian tribe, he assimilated the raw material for many of his later stories.
It is not surprising that young William Saroyan, who was destined to be a writer strongly in the American unschooled tradition, had an undistinguished academic career. He was urged to go to college, but college was not in his plans. When he was twelve years old, little Saroyan read, by chance, the Guy de Maupassant story “The Bell,” and the secret ambition to be a writer started to form. He became, then, a freque
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William Saroyan
Armenian writer (1908–1981)
William Saroyan[2] (; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. 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 (1941) are regarded as among his major achievements and essential documents of the cultural history of the period on the American West Coast.
He has been described in a Dickinson College news release as "one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century"[4]
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