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William Saroyan William Saroyan burst onto the American literary scene in 1934 with the publication of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories, a funny, poignant, and sometimes downright beautiful book. At the height of the Great Depression, Saroyan honored the underdog and charmed the country, and his boisterous voice stayed strong for decades. Over the next fifty years, he wrote over fifty novels, plays, screenplays, short story collections, and memoirs, including The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, Three Times Three, Obituaries, and perhaps most famously, the semi-autobiographical My Name is Aram, about an Armenian-American boy growing up in Fresno, California. Saroyan won an Oscar for Best Original Motion Picture Story for The Human Comedy, but he hated the saccharine film and promp