File:William_Saroyan_1970s.jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
William Saroyan
Sign in to saveArmenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer (1908-1981)
OverviewAI-generated
William Saroyan was an American male writer whose professional career began in 1934. Born on August 31, 1908, and deceased on May 18, 1981, he is associated with the United States. His literary output includes works such as *The time of your life*, *Yemot ḥayekha*, *Shokhne ha-meʻarot*, *Chʻnkʻushapatum*, and *Hetsanvordě Beverli Hilzitsʻ*.
Saroyan has been recognized within the Pulitzer Prize collection. He is the subject of numerous quotes, including statements about genius being play and the capacity for achieving it. While specific counts vary across different databases, his body of work is documented in various collections.
Synthesized by Vinony from 20 facts across 8 sources: Wikidata, Last.fm, Crossref, Wikiquote, MusicBrainz, Open Library, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1908-08-31
- Died
- 1981-05-18
- Works
- 226
Top works
- Hetsanvordě Beverli Hilzitsʻ
- Chʻnkʻushapatum
- Shokhne ha-meʻarot
- Yemot ḥayekha
- The time of your life
via Open Library + Wikidata
Music · MusicBrainz
- Type
- Person
- Gender
- Male
- Origin
- United States
- Active from
- 1908-08-31
- Active to
- 1981-05-18
via MusicBrainz · CC0
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 67
- Total plays
- 415
William Saroyan (pronounced /səˈrɔɪən/; 31 August 1908 - 18 May 1981) was an American-Armenian dramatist and author. The setting of many of his stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in California in his native Fresno. <a href="https://www.last.fm/music/William+Saroyan">Read more on Last.fm</a>
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- VMD: Visual molecular dynamics
· 1996 · cited 62,917x
- Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure
· 1976 · cited 44,815x
- Comparison of simple potential functions for simulating liquid water
· 1983 · cited 39,531x
- QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data
· 2010 · cited 30,942x
- Preparation of Graphitic Oxide
· 1958 · cited 28,681x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “All things lie dark in possibility.”
- “Genius is play, and man's capacity for achieving genius is infinite, and many may achieve genius only through play.”
- “All I can do is write my stories for mankind, and rest easy.”
- “I was a little afraid of him; not the boy himself, but of what he seemed to be: the victim of the world.”
- “He was just a young man who'd come to town on a donkey, bored to death or something, who'd taken advantage of the chance to be entertained by a small-town kid who was bored to death, too. That's the only way I could figure it out without accepting the general theory that he was crazy.”
- “Indians are born with an instinct for riding, rowing, hunting, fishing, and swimming. Americans are born with an instinct for fooling around with machines.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
~20 min read
Encyclopedic overview
William Saroyan (/səˈrɔɪən/; August 31, 1908 – May 18, 1981) was an American novelist, playwright, and short story writer of Armenian descent. He 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. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, The Human Comedy.
Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California. Many of his stories and plays are set in his native Fresno. Some of his best-known works are The Time of Your Life, My Name Is Aram and My Heart's in the Highlands. His two collections of short stories from the 1930s, Inhale Exhale (1936) and The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), are regarded as among his major achievements and essential documents of the cultural history of the period on the West Coast of the United States.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “William Saroyan” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.