William Saroyan

Who is William Saroyan?

William Saroyan was an Armenian-American writer born in Fresno, California, to immigrant parents from the Armenian community of Bitlis in the Ottoman Empire. Largely self-educated after leaving school at fifteen, he rose to prominence in the 1930s with short stories collected in The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and went on to write novels, plays, and memoirs exploring themes of poverty, family, and the immigrant experience in America. His play The Time of Your Life won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, which he controversially declined, and his novel The Human Comedy, later adapted into a film, won the National Book Award in 1943. Though he wrote in English and lived his life in America, Saroyan described himself as an Armenian writer at heart, and his 1936 essay "The Armenian and the Armenian," published in his collection Inhale and Exhale, became one of the most widely quoted English-language statements of Armenian resilience in the wake of the 1915 Armenian Genocide. He remained active as a writer until his death in Fresno in 1981.

Sources: William Saroyan, Inhale and Exhale (Random House, 1936) · Creative Armenia, "The Misquotation of William Saroyan" · William Saroyan House Museum, official biography