Essential Saroyan: Challenges and Practices (CALIFORNIA LEGACY BOOK)

A selection of William Saroyan's best writings

His name was on the lips of two generations, and countries around the world clamored for his work. An Armenian who grew up in the fields of Fresno, California, he traveled the globe, living in Paris, London, New York, and Los Angeles. He rubbed elbows with Steinbeck, traded insults with Hemingway, encouraged a young Toshio Mori, and stole a girl from Orson Welles. He was the only writer to turn down the Pulitzer Prize. Through his plays, short stories and novels, he exalted the mysteries of youth, pondered the impossibility of love, and spoke to this strange condition of being alive. Above all, he declared that the duty of a writer is to have one hell of a good time.

William Saroyan (1908-1981) was an internationally renowned Armenian American writer, playwright, and humanitarian. He achieved great popularity in the thirties, forties, and fifties through his hundreds of short stories, plays, novels, memoirs, and essays. In 1939, Saroyan was the first American writer to win both the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life. He famously refused to accept the Pulitzer Prize on the grounds that ''Commerce should not patronize art.'' He died near his hometown of Fresno at the age of seventy-two.

William Emery Justice, a fourth-generation Kansan, attended the University of Kansas, where he studied Russian literature and language, German literature, and religion. He worked as a farm laborer, a pizza maker, a vacuum salesman (he didn't sell a single machine), a roofer, a doughnut fryer, a bookbinder, a convenience store clerk (third shift), a copyist, and a video store clerk before joining Heyday as Acquisitions Editor.