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A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan, by John Leggett
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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.
- Sales Rank: #1545681 in Books
- Published on: 2002-11-05
- Released on: 2002-11-05
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.55" h x 1.43" w x 6.56" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 480 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Famous for his literary portrayal of failures and angry men, playwright William Saroyan (1908-1981) might have appreciated Leggett's depiction of his life as a "tragedy of rage and rejection." Leggett has experience with tragic author figures (he wrote an acclaimed biography of Ross Lockridge Jr. and of Thomas Heggan), and he describes in painstaking detail the hubris and callousness not to mention the gambling debts that destroyed Saroyan's once-charmed career. Though he became an international celebrity and consorted with literary and Hollywood luminaries from Hemingway to Greta Garbo, his impetuousness also caused him to lose his money and become estranged from most of his friends. Leggett offers keen insights into the motivations that drove Saroyan's outrageous behaviors, arguing, for example, that Saroyan rejected the Pulitzer in 1940 (for his play The Time of Your Life) because he saw all honors as "transactions in which he seemed to lose some precious independence and to catch an offensive whiff of servility." At times, such insights get lost amid the minutiae of Saroyan's career. As well, Leggett offers some implausibly detailed reports about Saroyan's internal state (for instance, Saroyan "managed to contain his joy... and thanked Arthur Freed in the most casual way," when the MGM exec praised a screenplay in a telephone conversation). Still, fans of publishing history will enjoy Leggett's play-by-play of Saroyan's career, and literary biography buffs will embrace the book as a cautionary tale. Photos.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
As Leggett (Ross and Tom) points out in this unflinchingly honest biography of the "Wonder Boy from Fresno," Saroyan was once all the rage but has now been largely forgotten except by academics, collectors, and zealots. Drawing upon Saroyan's notes, letters, and diaries, Leggett traces the development of Saroyan's writerly gifts from his childhood to his death. When his father died, Saroyan's mother placed him and his brother and sister in an orphanage, where Saroyan developed a self-sufficiency and hatred of institutions that followed him throughout his life. His fame rose meteorically, and he published his best plays, stories, and novels-Time of Our Life, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze, and The Human Comedy-before he was 30. His fame then faded as he descended into an inferno of gambling debts and failed relationships that marred his writing: chronicled here are Saroyan's relationships and conflicts with writers and actors who include Capote, Hemingway, Cagney, and Irwin Shaw. Leggett's thoughtful, critical readings provide a definitive and lucid portrait of the tragicomedy of Saroyan's life. Highly recommended for all libraries.
--Henry L. Carrigan Jr., Lancaster, PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Leggett has taken on the unpleasant biographical task of probing the rapid decline of a gifted, once highly successful writer into a futility that deeply undermined his posthumous reputation. Leggett tells the story with such poignancy that even readers indifferent to Saroyan's work will care about Saroyan's life. And what a strange life it was, combining a rags-to-riches young manhood straight out of Horatio Alger with a bleak maturity that might have been scripted by Eugene O'Neill. Yet behind both the early triumphs and the later breakdowns, Leggett discerns the same fierce self-reliance. For while Saroyan's self-reliance impelled him to wunderkind success on Broadway and in Hollywood (The Time of Your Life, The Human Comedy), it also made him combative when dealing with editors who tried to help him recognize and overcome his creative limitations. Leggett limns a parallel pattern in Saroyan's personal life, showing how affectionate amiability degenerated into misanthropic bitterness, twice destroying his marriage to Carol Marcus and poisoning his relationship with his children. A memorable portrait, sympathetic yet unsentimental. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
We all know he burst onto Broadway during the early 40's & was considered brilliant not only on stage
By crestline
I bought this book several yrs. ago & this is my 2nd time reading it & I think John Leggett has nailed his subject William Saroyan.
I have read many books where the writer mentioned working with writer's during Saroyan's time span in the 40's, 50's, 60.s, & of course,
William Saroyan's being the hot writer during these times was not hard to find other's professional opinion's about him & his works. We all know
he burst onto Broadway during the early 40's & was considered brilliant not only on stage, but movies as well. If one has read about extremely talented writers, composers, actors, etc. they tend to have many personal twerks that consume them & Saroyan was no exception. In many ways his personal decisions were not always rational with gambling being his destroyer, which proved to be personally a great burden for him & his family. His marriage to Carol Marcus always seemed to be a thorn in his side, loving her one moment & than fluctuating to other side of wishing he had married an Armenian wife, making one wonder how any woman could have dealt with his moods. Basically his writing life survived many obstacles, but his private life did not & as he aged he became angry (at everyone) & he lived in his own world. Interestingly this author took us for a honest ride through-out William Saroyan entire life, if you are looking for a happy ending there really is none!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
A Good Starting Point
By Malcolm Lowry
I have great respect for Mr. Leggett, who is currently the distinguished Director of the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and has a life-long history of solid authorship. To a reader who is new to the scope and drama of Saroyan's life, Mr. Leggett has delivered a worthwhile read. One is both repulsed and sympathetic at the same time about a very interesting character. Unfortunately however, I must agree with Janice Albert's observation on CATE that this biography on Saroyan is "a dismal effort." The author's attempts at getting "into the head," of his subject result in an incessant litany of seemingly pointless and banal observations that just go on and on, in an apparent attempt to recreate a living portrait. It becomes a very tiresome meander which ultimately begets the impression of a questionably researched work when certain details are patently incorrect. For example, Mr. Leggett writes that Saroyan's "thoughts" and "remembrances" on Hemingway's suicide state that Hemingway was the son
who found his father's body and that Saroyan wondered why Hemingway never wrote about the suicide. Without noting that both of these observations about Hemingway are false, Mr. Leggett's assumption of Saroyan's thoughts and remembrances appear to have taken him so far into the realm of imaginary host that he has lost his own objectivity.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
A Decent Biography
By J. Smallridge
Saroyan's life is very interesting, and very American, because it went up and down. He had three plays on Broadway at once and then had crumbling relationships. "The Daring Young Man ..." and "The Human Comedy" are two towering achievements, but some of his other work was not as strong. This biography covers his complete life as well as anything published.
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