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Essential Saroyan book cover
Essential Saroyan
Challenges and Practices
2000
First Published
4.24
Average Rating
413
Number of Pages
A selection of William Saroyan's best writings His name was on the lips of two generations, and countries around the world clamored for his work. An Armenian who grew up in the fields of Fresno, California, he traveled the globe, living in Paris, London, New York, and Los Angeles. He rubbed elbows with Steinbeck, traded insults with Hemingway, encouraged a young Toshio Mori, and stole a girl from Orson Welles. He was the only writer to turn down the Pulitzer Prize. Through his plays, short stories and novels, he exalted the mysteries of youth, pondered the impossibility of love, and spoke to this strange condition of being alive. Above all, he declared that the duty of a writer is to have one hell of a good time.
Avg Rating
4.24
Number of Ratings
25
5 STARS
60%
4 STARS
16%
3 STARS
16%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
4%
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Author

William Saroyan
William Saroyan
Author · 33 books

Works of American writer William Saroyan include short stories, such as "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1934), plays, most notably The Time of Your Life (1939), and novels. This Armenian author set much in Fresno, sometimes under a fictional name, the center of life in California. From Bitlis, Turkey, his parents migrated. After death of his father at the age of three years in 1911, people placed Saroyan in the orphanage in Oakland, California, together with his brother and sister, an experience he later described. Five years later, in 1916, the family reunited in Fresno, where his mother, Takoohi Saroyan, secured work at a cannery. He continued his own education and took odd jobs, such as working as an office manager for the San Francisco telegraph company, for support. After his mother showed him some of his father, he decided. Overland Monthly published a few of his early short articles. His first stories appeared in the 1930s. The Armenian journal Hairenik published "The Broken Wheel" under the name Sirak Goryan in 1933. Childhood experiences among the Armenian fruit of the San Joaquin Valley based much that dealt with the rootlessness of the migrant. The collection My Name is Aram (1940), an international bestseller, about a young boy and the colorful characters of his migrant family. People translated it into many languages. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William\_...

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