William Saroyan was an American - Armenian author. The setting of many of his stories and plays was Fresno, California (sometimes under a fictional name), the center of Armenian-American life in California and where he grew up.Saroyan was born in Fresno, California to Armenian immigrants from Bitlis, Turkey. At the age of three, after his father's death, Saroyan was placed in the 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, secured work at a cannery. He continued his education on his own, supporting himself by taking odd 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.For more info see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_...
Father of actress Lucy Saroyan.
Ex-wife Carol (nee Marcus) later married Walter Matthau.
Pictured on a 25 US commemorative postage stamp in the Literary Arts series, issued 22 May 1991. The Soviet Union also issued 1-ruble stamp with the same design on that date.
Children by Carol Grace: son Aram (b. 25 September 1943), daughter Lucy (b. 17 January 1946)
Divorced Carol Grace when he learned she was illegitimate and Jewish, but soon tried to get her to take him back. She divorced him within months of their second marriage.
Won 1940 Pulitzer Prize for his play "The Time Of Your Life"; he declined the award.
The Academy Award statuette that he won for "The Human Comedy" briefly adorrned a pawn shop window in San Francisco. The Oscar has been in possession of Saroyans sister, and after she died in 1990, someone hocked it at the Mission Jewelry & Loan Co. for $250. Pawn broker Darryl Kaplan donated it to the William Saroyan Society in Fresno, California, despite having numerous offers to buy it, including one for $20,000 from a literary figure. The Oscar eventually was transferred to the Fresno Metropolitan Museum. Fresno was Saroyans hometown and the site where "The Human Comedy" takes place.
The Best Writing, Original Story Academy Award he won for "The Human Comedy" was made out of plaster. Though he didnt attend the ceremony held at Graumanns Chinese Theatre on March 2, 1944, saying he "didnt want to bother carrying it around," he did eventually get the Oscar. The plaster award was exchanged for a metal one in 1946 after World War Two restrictions on metals were lifted. His sister Cosette, knowing he didnt want it, asked for it, and he gave it to her. Although thought missing after his death in 1981, it was in fact in her possession until she died in 1990.
Biography in: "The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives". Volume One, 1981-1985, pages 701-703. New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1998.
His play, "My Hearts in the Highlands", was written in twenty-four hours.
Once brought a greasy bag of fried prawns into a high class bar in San Francisco. When he noticed that people were staring at him, he offered to share them with everybody.
Had never been to the East Coast before 1934.
Cousin of Ross Bagdasarian , who sang the 1958 novelty song "Witch Doctor" and created Alvin and the Chipmunks.
Half of his ashes are buried in California, and the other half in Armenia.
See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water.
Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing,and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if,they will not create a New Armenia.
You may tend to get cancer from the thing that makes you want to smoke so much, not from the smoking itself.
But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.
It takes a lot of rehearsing for a man to be himself.
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case.
I believe there are ways whose ends are life instead of death.
The purpose of writing is both to keep up with life and to run ahead of it. I am little comfort to myself, although I am the only comfort I have, excepting perhaps streets, clouds, the sun, the faces and voices of kids and the aged, and similar accidents of beauty, innocence, truth and loneliness.
This is what drives a young writer out of his head, this feeling that nothing is being said.
Remember that every man is a variation of yourself,All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
When Ulysses saw his brother, a wonderful thing happened to his face. All the terror left his eyes, because now he was hom,When I began to wait to live I really began to wait to die.
A poverty-stricken nation with a great art is a greater nation than a wealthy nation with a poverty-stricken art.
Although I write in English, and despite the fact that I’m from America, I consider myself an Armenian writer. The words I use are in English, the surroundings I write about are American, but the soul, which makes me write, is Armenian. This means I am an Armenian writer and deeply love the honor of being a part of the family of Armenian wrtiters.
You know the look: genius gone to pot, and ready to join the Communist Party,How do you write? You write, man, you write, that’s how…If you practice an art faithfully it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.
Whatever neutrality is, it is not very useful to anybody, and time is running out. If we do not do useful things whenever it is possible or necessary to do them, we shall soon be totally departed from the human scene, and forgotten, or remembered only for having disappeared. Armenians are too vital to be permitted to throw themselves away in neutrality, comfort, well-being, satisfaction, and so on and so forth.
What a lonely and silly thing it is to be an Armenian writer in America.
But, it didn’t matter that my mother suspected and knew that I was a writer. It was expected of me to take care of my share of the responsibility of making our way in the world as a family. In those days, also, it was unheard of, by us certainly, that to get any help, even from members of our own family, let alone from the government, which would have been disgraceful. Thank God that that kind of folly in thinking is obsolete. There is a temptation to feel, ‘Well, we all made it; why can’t these other poor people make it?’ And, of course, nothing is more than stupid than that attitude. I must confess that I find that attitude among many countrymen of my own who do find themselves taking undue pride in their own sense of ability — of being equal to any situation, and of seeing it through and improving it, and so on. And then, putting that against other people who don’t have that, and thereby implying that the other people are lazy. Not taking into account the whole different structure and identity and a people who have survived for centuries under very harsh conditions and members of a very great culture, and I am talking about the Indians, to begin with, in the Valley — the San Joaquin Valley, in Fresno, in Tulare, and the mountains, and there are many tribes of them, of different kinds, and I am talking about, also, the Mestizos, the mixtures of Mexican, Spaniards with Indians, making the Mexican. And I am talking about any minority which is considered by anybody as being innately of itself indolent. This kind of narrow thinking is a temptation to all sorts of people, and one has to be sympathetic with the people who are wrong, too, you see. It is not enough just to be sympathetic with the people who are belittled; it is necessary to be sympathetic with the people who belittle them. So, in worrying about the persecuted, one is obliged also to worry about the persecutors. I consider that a basic measure of growth.
There is little pride in writers. They know they are human and shall some day die and be forgotten. Knowing all this a writer is gentle and kindly where another man is severe and unkind.
I care so much about everything that I care about nothing,All things lie dark in possibility.
Every man in the world is better than some one else. And not as good as some one else.
Of course if you like your kids if you love them from the moment they begin you yourself begin all over again in them and with them.
Be grateful for yourself. . . be thankful.
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.
Every man in the world is better than someolne else and not as good as someone else.
Every man in the world is better than someone else and not as good as someone else.
