Word: saroyans
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...William Saroyan...
...story goes that in 1934, while a guest at San Francisco's Palace Hotel, Publisher Bennett Cerf was informed that "a young man who says he is the world's greatest author is in the lobby." Replied Cerf unhesitatingly: "Tell Mr. Saroyan to come right up." Playwright William Saroyan was still rambunctiously self-assured a few days before cancer killed him last week in Fresno, Calif. "Everybody has got to die," he said, "but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case...
...interesting case. Saroyan was born in Fresno, son of Armenian refugees who fled the Turkish massacres at the beginning of the century. He knew the wrench of separation and the insular poverty of California's little Armenias: Saroyan's early years were spent in an orphanage after his father died and his mother had to work full time. Like the young bringer of good news and bad in his screenplay turned novel The Human Comedy, Saroyan began his working life as a telegraph boy. When his short story The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze...
Postwar critics showed little enthusiasm for Saroyan's tart sentimentalism and the anxious vitality of his plays. Yet the ease and charm of many of his stories will continue to inspire young writers. It is a legacy beyond criticism...
Steve Tesich, the playwright whose first movie script, Breaking Away, received the indulgences of a good many critics, writes masterly first acts. He has the Saroyan sense to devise a solid foundation on which his eccentrics and lowlifes dance to their own ricochet rhythms. But when it comes to complicating and resolving a plot, Tesich falls back on the conventions of melodrama. Around the soft center of Daryll and Tony's affair, he has woven a crazy quilt of stereotypes-the cold-eyed killer, the silent accomplice, the wealthy parents, the deranged Vietvet. At the climax-a reprise...