All his life a man fights death, and then at last loses the fight, always having known he would. Loneliness is every man's portion, and failure. The man who seeks to escape from loneliness is a lunatic. The man who does not know that all is failure is a fool. The man who does not laugh at these things is a bore. Arak Vagramian, a handsome son of Armenian immigrants, contended with his small-town bar-tending job in Fresno, is one day spotted by a Hollywood filmmaker. Although at first he refuses to leave his hometown, job, family and friends, soon the splendour of Hollywood lifestyle lures him. Shortly after he becomes Rock Wagram � a Hollywood heart-throb and celebrity. But at the peak of his career he decides to enter the army and serve his country during the war. When in 1950 he attempts to resume his acting career he battles with the many challenges which the fast changing industry throws at him. Rock Wagram, first published in 1951, is an inspiring tale about one's search for the true identity in the unstable world of commercial success, where family ties and loyalties often have to be compromised.
Author
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\_...
