William saroyan biography summary organizer

About William Saroyan

William Saroyan was born in Fresno on the last day of August 1908. Following their father’s death, William, his brother Henry, and his sisters Zabel and Cosette spent several years at the Fred Finch Orphanage in Oakland, while young widow Takoohi took up menial work in nearby San Francisco.

The family was eventually reunited back in Fresno, in the San Joaquin Valley, and William Saroyan’s formidable maternal grandmother Lucy (also widowed), who was to be a strong influence on him, joined the household. As he grew up there, an American boy also becoming part of the exiled Armenian tribe, he assimilated the raw material for many of his later stories.

It is not surprising that young William Saroyan, who was destined to be a writer strongly in the American unschooled tradition, had an undistinguished academic career.

He was urged to go to college, but college was not in his plans. When he was twelve years old, little Saroyan read, by chance, the Guy de Maupassant