William saroyan brief biography examples
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His most successful early collection was My Name is Aram (1940), a book presenting in a poetical light the Armenians of his hometown in the days on his boyhood. The film, starring Mickey Rooney, was a hit, but was hardly to Saroyan’s liking. He was drinking and gambling heavily, and in these were no doubt contributory factors in the marriage breakdown.
Over the last twenty years of his life Saroyan concentrated on personal memoirs.
1966 Saroyan forms the William Saroyan Foundation.
1968 Saroyan publishes I Used to Believe I Had Forever, Now I’m Not So Sure.
1979 Saroyan publishes Obituaries.
1980 William Saroyan is nominated for the American Book Award for Obituaries.
1981 William Saroyan dies of cancer in Fresno, California on May 18.
Sourced from: "William Saroyan - Biography" Masterpieces of American Literature Ed.
Steven G. Kellman. I ate the grapes and remembered Fresno, my father long dead, my mother at last in a brand-new home of her own in San Francisco.
He often justified it by saying that it helped his work, and many of his best stories and plays were apparently written in the aftermath of a bad gambling experience. August 31st was the last day of the 8th month of the year. The meaning of California was unknown, and how it came to be put upon that enormous area of land on the Pacific coast was also unknown.
About William Saroyan
But then this is the story, this is always at least the beginning of it, and at the same time it is also always the one thing that is there all through the rest of it, because once you are born, that's it, you've got it, you've had it, you are the one you are, you are not anybody else just born.
I was the last of four, although nobody was sure there weren't to be any more, or that my father was less than three years from the end of putting on and taking off his shoes.
But gambling losses used up the vineyard money and at length he found himself in Paris, faced once more with the unwelcome prospect of trying to work himself out of debt. Latterly the critics were finding much to admire in his work, and Obituaries was accorded generous attention in The New York Times Book Review.
William Saroyan once said that to write was for him simply to stay alive in an interesting way.
She waited for word in her own nearby house, Hripsime der Hovanessian, widow of Petrus Saroyan.
Minas and Petrus, although both named Saroyan, were not related, Petrus having become a Saroyan by adoption. I didn't mention, but not on purpose, that Takoohi Saroyan stood and held the edge of an open door at the time of the birth, so I'm mentioning it now, as it may be of interest to somebody.
I'm going to say it, but I'm not sure I'm going to believe it.
'I’m a poet, a preacher, I speak and read and write English, I can take a pulpit and give an extemporaneous sermon that people can never forget, what am I doing picking grapes on a hot vineyard twelve miles east of a desolate town called Fresno?
When he was twelve years old, little Saroyan read, by chance, the Guy de Maupassant story “The Bell,” and the secret ambition to be a writer started to form. It is a legacy beyond criticism.”
-An excerpt from A Biographical Sketch by Brian Darwent, Frodsham, England, November 1983
Timeline
1908 William Saroyan was born in Fresno, California, on August 31, 1908, the son of Armenak and Takoohi Saroyan, poor Armenian immigrants.
1911 When his father died, Saroyan was put into an Oakland orphanage with his brother, Henry, and his two sisters, Cosette and Zabel.
1915 He returned to Fresno with his family.
And at the same time his literary career went into steep decline. Many years afterwards he was to write that the only success that means anything to a writer happens when he becomes accepted as a writer at all. Here was America, for instance, and there was my father, but the man simply wasn't inventing automobiles, buying and selling horses, telling lies, cheating, or in any other way demonstrating a natural-born ability to be a success.
This American classic earned for the new playwright the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize (it was the first play to win both), though the latter he declined because of his strong feelings about commerce patronizing the arts.
Late in 1941 he took time off from his theatrical activities to write a film scenario in Hollywood, The Human Comedy.
Surprisingly, for a collection of short stories, the book was a best-seller. “I certainly didn’t gamble away every penny,” he wrote in a memoir, in a flippant mood. I don't know what his father's name had been but it certainly hadn't been Saroyan, and so there it is at the outset, the problem of the name.
By rights my family name should be the name of the father of my paternal grandfather, Petrus.
By October 1934 Random House was ready to publish The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze andOther Stories.