24 Facts About Leon Surmelian

Leon Zaven Surmelian was an Armenian-American writer.

Leon Surmelian is well known for translating the Armenian epic Daredevils of Sassoun into English.

Leon Surmelian was born on November 24,1905, in Trabzon, Trebizond Vilayet, Ottoman Empire to pharmacist Garabed Surmelian and Zvart Diradurian.

Leon Surmelian has noted that his father strongly supported Armenian-Turkish friendship, and was the only Armenian in Trabzon critical of Russia.

Leon Surmelian's uncle, named Leon, was a member of the Dashnak Armenian Revolutionary Federation while he was growing up.

In 1915, during the Armenian Genocide, Leon Surmelian lost both of his parents, but was adopted, along with his three siblings, by a Greek doctor who was a family-friend at the time.

In 1916, eleven-year-old Leon Surmelian boarded a Russian ship to Batumi, then Krasnodar.

In 1918, after an armistice during the First World War, Leon Surmelian arrived in Constantinople with a group of friends and later attended the Armash Farming School in Armash.

In 1922, the Armenian Union of Agriculture helped Leon Surmelian move to America, where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Administration degree from Kansas State University.

Leon Surmelian originally wanted to study agriculture in America to go back and reconstruct Armenia.

Leon Surmelian's writing can be traced back to 1920, when he met Vahan Tekeyan, an Armenian poet, at the amphitheater of the Armenian Central School in Istanbul.

In 1924, Leon Surmelian collected his various poems and published his first and only Armenian work, Joyous Light, in Paris, France.

From 1931 to 1932, Leon Surmelian served as the editor of the first Armenian-American weekly paper in English, the Armenian Messenger.

In 1937, Leon Surmelian naturalized as an American citizen, and then went to work at the Los Angeles County Department of Probation from 1943 to 1944.

Leon Surmelian briefly wrote as a screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios from 1944 to 1945.

In 1945, Leon Surmelian published I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, an autobiography of his life during the Armenian Genocide in English which would later be translated into Italian, Swedish, Czech, and Turkish.

Leon Surmelian then went to translate the Armenian national epic Daredevils of Sassoun into English in 1964.

Whilst working on Apples of Immortality and Daredevils of Sassoun, Leon Surmelian was simultaneously lecturing at the University of Southern California and continued to do so until 1969.

Leon Surmelian died on October 3,1995 and was buried in Forest Lawn Mortuary, in Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California.

At just 19, Leon Surmelian won praise from the Armenian community worldwide.

Apples of Immortality, published by the University of California Press in 1968, presented 40 Armenian folktales that, according to Leon Surmelian, "only needed a little trimming and stitching" to make the book comprehensible to the non-Armenian.

Vahan Tekeyan, who helped Leon Surmelian edit his Joyous Light poems, often exchanged letters with Leon Surmelian.

Leon Surmelian himself says that Austrian-Bohemian author Franz Werfel and fellow Armenian-American writer William Saroyan inspired him to tell the Armenian story in a different language.

Saroyan would later go on to write the introduction to Leon Surmelian's I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Leon Surmelian would eventually go on to be known as the most widely read Armenian-American author after Saroyan.