William Saroyan (; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio rejected his original 240-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. Some of his best-known works are The Time of Your Life, My Name Is Aram and My Heart's in the Highlands. He has been described in a Dickinson College news release as "one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century" 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". Kurt Vonnegut has said that Saroyan was "the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists.”
William Saroyan
Author details
- Born:
- Aug. 31, 1908
- Died:
- May 18, 1981
External links
Books by William Saroyan
The United States in Literature
by Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Thomas Jefferson, and 200 others
Marc Connelly, Joseph Mitchell, Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain, Washington Irving, A. J. Liebling, E. E. Cummings, Glen Rounds, Clifton Fadiman, Oliver Herford, Booth Tarkington, Bret Harte, Cornelia Otis Skinner, George Ade, N. P. Willis, Ambrose Bierce, Kenneth Fearing, James M. Cain, Edgar Allan Poe, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Richard Lockridge, Carolyn Wells, E.B. White, Ludwig Bemelmans, James Russell Lowell, Anita Loos, Katharine S. White, Leonard Q. Ross, John Mosher, Edward Streeter, Arthur Kober, Heywood Broun, Frank Moore Colby, McKelway, St. Clair, Frederic S. Cozzens, Charles Heber Clark, Francis Steegmuller, James T. Fields, Moffat, Donald W., Phyllis McGinley, Orpheus C. Kerr, V. Petroleum Nasby, Finley Peter Dunne, Frank Sullivan, Robert C. Benchley, Franklin P. Adams, Gibbs, Wolcott, Corey Ford, Nunnally Johnson, Lucretia P. Hale, Clifford Orr, Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne), Russell Maloney, Geoffrey Hellman, M, George W. Harris, Alfred Henry Lewis, Roark Bradford, Frances Warfield, Billings, Josh, Will Cuppy, Alexander Woolcott, Persis Greely Anderson, Nathan, George Jean, Alva Johnston, Sanderson Vanderbilt, E. J. Kahn Jr., John McNulty, Angela Cypher, H. C. Bunner, Irwin Edman, Samuel Hoffenstein, Guiterman, Arthur, Taylor, Bert Leston, Benjamin Franklin, Clarence Hollister Knapp, Kenneth Allan Robinson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lee Strout White, Stephen Vincent Benét, Ruth Ann McKinney, Ogden Nash, David McCord, Morris Bishop, William Saroyan, Don Marquis, Louis Untermeyer, Day, Clarence, Frank R. Stockton, Donald Ogden Stewart, Eugene Field, Joel Chandler Harris, James Thurber, Sally Benson, H. L. Mencken, S. J. Perelman, Ring Lardner: A Subtreasury of American humor (1962, Capricorn Books)
A Subtreasury of American humor
by Marc Connelly, Joseph Mitchell, Sinclair Lewis, and 95 others
