Critical Essays on William Saroyan PDF Download

Author: Harry Keyishian
Publisher: Twayne Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Armenian-American author William Saroyan enjoyed tremendous popularity in the 1930s with his stories of immigrants and children of Fresno, California. Saroyan's short story collection The Man on the Flying Trapese (1934), his Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Time of Your Life (1940) and the story collection My name is Aram (1941) were commercial and critical successes, establishing Sarayon as a major author of that period. Harry Keyishian's aim in editing this collection of critical essays is to provide a broad selection of the best thought on Saroyan's life and writing, and to introduce several previously unpublished essays that focus more specifically on the texts themselves.

Author: Leo Hamalian
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
ISBN: 9780838633083
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
An illustrated compilation of critical essays, intimate recollections, biographical notes, and interviews which sheds new light on the life and work of Pulitzer Prize winner William Saroyan (1913-81). Reflections by his son and daughter and a candid interview with Garig Basmadjian reveal the intimate side of the talented celebrity trying to cope with his human weakness.

Author: Nona Balakian
Publisher: Bucknell University Press
ISBN: 9780838753682
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
In this work, the author tells how Saroyan transformed the short story by personalizing it and by loosening the structure of the novella form. He went on to bring new life to the theater and to the telling of autobiography. Better than that of any recent drama critic, Balakian's chapters on the theater place Saroyan's plays in the larger framework of the American theater of his time and achieve the creation of a total picture of the state of the American theater of the 1930s.

Author: William Saroyan
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486490904
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
"Marvelously captivating." — The New York Times. First published in 1940, Saroyan's international bestseller recounts the exploits of an Armenian clan in northern California at the turn of the 20th century. Based on the author's loving and eccentric extended family, the characters in these 14 related short stories provide humorous and touching scenes from immigrant life.

Author: John Leggett
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
He was so famous that Saroyanesque entered the vocabulary of his time, an adjective expressing the childlike sweetness, the evocation of loneliness, the innocence that characterized his work. His name was known to anyone in America who read a magazine, listened to the radio, cared about theater, or bought a book. At one time he had three plays simultaneously on Broadway, including My Heart’s in the Highlands and The Time of Your Life (which won the Pulitzer Prize and the Drama Critics’ Circle Award). His first collection of stories, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, was published by Bennett Cerf when Saroyan was twenty-six years old; it was a critical and commercial success. Saroyan went to Hollywood and wrote The Human Comedy over a Christmas holiday; it became a major wartime movie and won him an Oscar for best screenplay. His writing was a mixture of old-world suffering and new-world optimism. But for all of his promise and brilliance, and his half-century struggle to reach the pantheon of American writers, his gift was not large enough to sustain him. Now, in this full-scale biography, John Leggett gives us Saroyan whole, from the immigrant boy and his lonely orphanage years to the internationally acclaimed American writer. Here is the all-encompassing story —the fun, the follies, the lights, and the shadows of his life. Leggett writes about Saroyan’s roller-coaster courtship and two marriages to the beautiful Carol Marcus (she was seventeen and he thirty-four when they met); about his relationships with his publishers and with his long-time agent, Hal Matson; about his friendships with Budd Schulberg, Irwin Shaw, George Jean Nathan, and others, and the many productions (on Broadway and off) of Saroyan’s plays. He writes about Saroyan’s constant struggle with his addictions to gambling and extravagant living . . . his disappointments as a writer and his undiminished belief in his own talent, a belief that it would prevail, no matter how many colleagues turned away from his excesses and his demands. Drawing on interviews and on Saroyan’s letters, notes, and diaries, John Leggett, author of Ross and Tom (“A great book”—Leon Edel), gives us a revealing portrait of the man and the writer whose work charmed and touched the heart of mid-twentieth-century America.

Author: William Saroyan
Publisher: Samuel French, Inc.
ISBN: 9780573622151
Category : American drama
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
"Hello, Out There" reveals the adventure of Photo Finish, an itinerant gambler, who is arrested and jailed in a small Texas town and charged with rape.

Author: William Saroyan
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811212823
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 104

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Book Description
Eleven of William Saroyan's most delightful tales, Fresno Stories springs straight from the source of the author's vision--"the archetypal Armenian families who inhabit Saroyan country, in and around Fresno, California." (Chicago Tribune)

Author: William Saroyan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
This book introduces the Essentials Collection that showcases celebrated California writers whose works have gained international recognition. This selection draws on the best of Saroyan's short stories, novels, drama, and autobiography.

Author: William Saroyan
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 9780811211291
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
"What a delight to find seventeen of Saroyan's uncollected stories within one cover!....charming tales, all blessed with Saroyan's pixieish imagination and magical writing style....Even today they read as though they have been freshly minted from the Saroyan treasure house. A discovery for those who love Saroyan's fiction; his spark is still wonderfully alive." --Library Journal

Author: William Saroyan
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 081122533X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Saroyan’s debut collection of stories. A timeless selection of brilliant short stories that won William Saroyan a position among the foremost, most widely popular writers of America when it first appeared in 1934.With the greatest of ease William Saroyan flew across the literary skies in 1934 with the publication of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories. One of the first American writers to describe the immigrant experience in the U.S., Saroyan created characters who were Armenians, Jews, Chinese, Poles, Africans, and the Irish. The title story touchingly portrays the thoughts of a very young writer, dying of starvation. All of the tales were written during the great depression and reflect, through pathos and humor, the mood of the nation in one of its greatest times of want.