Biography of william saroyan

William Saroyan (Armenian: Վիլյամ Սարոյան) (August 31, - May 18, ) was an Americanauthor who wrote many plays and short stories about growing up impoverished as the son of Armenian immigrants. These stories were popular during the Great Depression. Saroyan grew up in Fresno, the center of Armenian-Americans in California, where many of his works are set (although he sometimes gave the city a fictional name).

Asked how to say his name, he told The Literary Digest "In Armenian it is sor-row'yan, accent on row. In America it is mispronounced with 'roy.'" ^[1]

Life

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Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, the son of an Armenian immigrant. His father moved to New Jersey in - he was a small vineyard owner, who had been educated as a Presbyterian minister. At a certain point his father was forced to take farm-laboring work, and he died in At the age of four, William Saroyan was placed in the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland, California, together with his brother and sister - an experience he later described in his writing. Five years later the family reunited in Fresno, where his mother, Takoohi, had obtained work in a cannery.

Quotations

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• "The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth

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  About William Saroyan

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William Saroyan

Armenian writer (–)

William Saroyan^[2] (; August 31, – May 18, ) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in , and in won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio rejected his original 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 s, Inhale Exhale () and The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze () 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 midth 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]Kurt Vonnegut has said that Saroyan was "the first and st