3. William Saroyan was born on August 31, 1908
in Fresno, California to Armenak and Takoohi
Saroyan, Armenian immigrants from
Bitlis, Ottoman Empire.
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, Takoohi, 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.
4. 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.
5.
6. 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 memories.
7. 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.
Several of Saroyan's works were drawn from
his own experiences, although his approach to
autobiographical fact contained a fair bit of
poetic license.
8. In some respects, Saroyan's characters
resemble the penniless writer in Knut Hamsun
1890 novel Hunger, but lack the anger and
nihilism of Hamsun's narrator. The story was
republished in a collection whose royalties
enabled Saroyan to travel to Europe and
Armenia.
's
9. Saroyan 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.
Before the war, Saroyan worked on the
screenplay of Golden Boy (1939), based on
Clifford Odets play, but he never had much
success in Hollywood and after his
disappointment with the Human Comedy film
project, he never permitted any Hollywood
screen adaptation of any of his novels
regardless of his financial straits.
10. 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
Standford 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."
11. Saroyan has 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.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.
