25 Facts About William Saroyan

William Saroyan was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer.

William Saroyan 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 wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California.

William Saroyan was born on August 31,1908, in Fresno, California, to Armenak and Takuhi Saroyan, Armenian immigrants from Bitlis, Ottoman Empire.

William Saroyan's father came to New York in 1905 and started preaching in Armenian Apostolic churches.

William Saroyan later went on to describe his experience in the orphanage in his writings.

William Saroyan continued his education on his own, supporting himself with jobs, such as working as an office manager for the San Francisco Telegraph Company.

William Saroyan decided to become a writer after his mother showed him some of his father's writings.

Many of William Saroyan's stories were based on his childhood experiences among the Armenian-American fruit growers of the San Joaquin Valley or dealt with the rootlessness of the immigrant.

William Saroyan worked rapidly, hardly editing his text, and drinking and gambling away much of his earnings.

William Saroyan published essays and memoirs, in which he depicted the people he had met on travels in the Soviet Union and Europe, such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, and Charlie Chaplin.

In 1952, William Saroyan published The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, the first of several volumes of memoirs.

William Saroyan is probably best remembered for his play The Time of Your Life, set in a waterfront saloon in San Francisco.

William Saroyan then turned the script into a novel, publishing it just prior to the release of the film, for which he won the 1943 Academy Award for Best Story.

William Saroyan served in the United States Army during World War II and was stationed in Astoria, Queens, spending much of his time at the Lombardy Hotel in Manhattan, far from Army personnel.

William Saroyan narrowly avoided a court martial when his novel, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, was seen as advocating pacifism.

Interest in William Saroyan's novels declined after the war, when he was criticized for sentimentality.

Many of William Saroyan's later plays, such as The Paris Comedy, The London Comedy, and Settled Out of Court, premiered in Europe.

William Saroyan wrote the song in 1939 with his cousin Ross Bagdasarian, adapting the music from an Armenian folk song.

From 1958 on, William Saroyan mainly resided in a Paris apartment.

William Saroyan had a correspondence with writer Sanora Babb that began in 1932 and ended in 1941, that grew into an unrequited love affair on William Saroyan's part.

In 1943, William Saroyan married actress Carol Grace, with whom he had two children: Aram, who became an author and published a book about his father, and Lucy, who became an actress.

William Saroyan died in Fresno, of prostate cancer at the age of 72.

In 1940 William Saroyan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life, but he refused the award.

In 1943 William Saroyan received the Academy Award for his screenplay for The Human Comedy, a screenplay he adapted into a novel that was published just prior to the release of the film.