William Saroyan burst onto the American literary scene in 1934 with the publication of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, a funny, poignant, and sometimes downright beautiful book. At the height of the Great Depression, Saroyan honored the underdog and charmed the country, and his boisterous voice stayed strong for decades. Over the next fifty years, he wrote over fifty novels, plays, screenplays, short story collections, and memoirs, including The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, Three Times Three, Obituaries, and perhaps most famously, the semi-autobiographical My Name is Aram, about an Armenian-American boy growing up in Fresno, California. Saroyan won an Oscar for Best Original Motion Picture Story for The Human Comedy, but he hated the saccharine film and promptly churned out a superior novel by the same name. He turned down a Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life, saying that commerce had no role supporting art, and that besides, he should have received the honor the year before for My Heart's in the Highlands.
William Saroyan's life was admittedly rocky. His parents fled their home in Armenia after the Turks had begun their genocide, and although Saroyan was born on American soil, he could not forget the slaughter of 1.3 million Armenians. When he was just two years old, his father died, and his mother was forced to put her four young children in an orphanage for five years until she could earn enough money to support the family. At age eighteen, Saroyan dropped out of high school and worked a series of odd jobs. He took a bus to New York City to try to be a writer, but returned just a few months later, cold, lonely and broke. As an adult, he was plagued with drinking problems. He had a fiery temper. He married and divorced the same woman, Carol Marcus, twice. He gambled compulsively, running up massive debts that frequently required him to borrow money from friends and publishers.
