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William Saroyan

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William Saroyan
William Saroyan in the 1970s
William Saroyan in the 1970s
Born(1908-08-31)August 31, 1908
Fresno, California, U.S.
DiedMay 18, 1981(1981-05-18) (aged 72)
Fresno, California, U.S.
Resting placeArarat Cemetery, Fresno[1]
Komitas Pantheon, Yerevan, Armenia
OccupationNovelist, playwright, short story writer
NationalityArmenian American
Period1934–1980
Notable worksThe Armenian and the Armenian (1935)
My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)
The Time of Your Life (1939)
My Name Is Aram (1940)
The Human Comedy (1943)
Notable awardsPulitzer Prize for Drama (1940)
Academy Award for Best Story (1943)
SpouseCarol Grace (1943–49, 1951–52)
ChildrenAram Saroyan (b. 1943)
Lucy Saroyan (1946–2003)
RelativesRoss Bagdasarian Sr. (cousin)
Signature
Saroyan's signature

William Saroyan[2] (/səˈrɔɪən/; 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 adaptation of his 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.

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]

Biography

Saroyan as a youth

Early years

William Saroyan 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.[6]

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. He later went on to describe his experience in the orphanage in his writings. Five years later, the family reunited in Fresno, where his mother, Takuhi, had already secured work at a cannery. He continued his education on his own, supporting himself with jobs, such as working as an office manager for the San Francisco Telegraph Company.

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 in the 1930s. 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

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.

Through the air on the flying trapeze, his mind hummed. Amusing it was, astoundingly funny. A trapeze to God, or to nothing, a flying trapeze to some sort of eternity; he prayed objectively for strength to make the flight with grace.

The story was republished in a collection whose royalties 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 celebrated optimism in the midst of the trials and tribulations of the Depression. He worked rapidly, hardly editing his text, and drinking and gambling away much of his earnings.

I am an estranged man, said the liar: estranged from myself, from my family, my fellow man, my country, my world, my time, and my culture. I am not estranged from God, although I am a disbeliever in everything about God excepting God indefinable, inside all and careless of all.

— from Here Comes There Goes You Know Who, 1961
Saroyan in 1940

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.

"Mrs. Sandoval," Homer said swiftly, "your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong ...

— 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.

Autographed portrait of Saroyan

Saroyan served in the United States 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 film unit. 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. 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 (1969), 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."

Saroyan also painted.[7] 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."[8] His abstract expressionist works were exhibited by the Anita Shapolsky Gallery in New York City.[7][9][10][11][12] 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.[13] The Indian educational board CBSE has added a chapter of his in the 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.[14]

In 1943, Saroyan married actress Carol Marcus (1924–2003; also known as Carol Grace), with whom he had two children, Aram, who became an author and published a book about his father, and Lucy, who became an actress.[15] 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,[16][17] that Saroyan was abusive.

Carol subsequently married actor Walter Matthau.

Saroyan died in Fresno, of prostate cancer at the age of 72. Half of his ashes were buried in 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.[18]

Commemoration

Statue of William Saroyan in Yerevan, Armenia

In 2008 a monument[19] 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” [20]. In 2015 several libraries were opened in honor of William Saroyan in the city of Bitlis, Turkey [21].

On August 31, 2018, The William Saroyan House Museum was opened in the house where Saroyan lived the last 17 years of his life[22], in the city of Fresno, the USA[23][24]. 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.[25]

In 1991 the USA[26] and the USSR[27] (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[28] and a 5,000 Dram banknote in 2018.[29]

Awards

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.[30][31][32]

Bibliography

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