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William Saroyan [2] (/ s ə ˈ r ɔɪ ə n /; 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 .
William Saroyan (born Aug. 31, 1908, Fresno, Calif., U.S.—died May 18, 1981, Fresno) was a U.S. writer who made his initial impact during the Depression with a deluge of brash, original, and irreverent stories celebrating the joy of living in spite of poverty, hunger, and insecurity.
William Saroyan was born in Fresno on the last day of August 1908. Following their father’s death, William, his brother Henry, and his sisters Zabel and Cosette spent several years at the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland, while young widow Takoohi took up menial work in nearby San Francisco.
May 19, 1981 · William Saroyan, whose plays, short stories and novels drew on the Armenian immigrant experience and depicted the variety and romance of American life, died of cancer yesterday at the Veterans ...
Works of American writer William Saroyan include short stories, such as "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze" (1934), plays, most notably The Time of Your Life (1939), and novels. This Armenian author set much in Fresno, sometimes under a fictional name, the center of life in California.
1959 Proclaiming himself a tax exile, Saroyan left the United States for Europe, producing plays in London before returning to teach at Purdue University in 1961. Thereafter, Saroyan met with little success as a playwright and turned almost exclusively to fiction and autobiography.
Born in 1908, the fourth child of a poor Armenian immigrant family, Saroyan grew up in a community that managed to escape the genocide in Armenia. Surrounded by love but not much food, the family struggled to build a new life in the agricultural community of Fresno.