Book Description
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.


About the Author
William Saroyan (1908-1981), famous for a long and voluminous career, burst upon the literary scene in 1934 with his celebrated short-story collection of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. He went on to write novels, along with some sixteen story collections, and plays including The Human Comedy and The Time of Your Life, for which he won the Drama Critics Circle and Pulitzer Prizes. He lived and wrote about "the archetypal Armenian families who inhabit "Saroyan Country", in and around Fresno, California. [And yet with their] unpredictable charm and wacky spontaneity...his characters overflow with so much human comedy that they transcend all ethnic boundaries, as in the stories of I.B. Singer" (Chicago Tribune).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

William Saroyan's debut collection of stories made a tremendous splash in the literary world, adding an author in love with his own madcap sincerity to a pantheon full of serious-minded modernists. Saroyan, who won (and then refused) the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life, always wrote about humanity, and always on a human scale. He was also one of the first American writers of this century to focus so much attention on immigrant communities. The protagonists sailing about The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze are often Armenian, Jewish, Chinese, Polish, African, or Irish; and all are treated with what The San Francisco Chronicle called "the old Saroyan luminousness, which is to say with an insight as fresh as that of an unusually perceptive child."

FROM THE CRITICS

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