A Daring Young Man: A Biography of William Saroyan - Hardcover

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 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.

John Leggett was born in New York City and graduated from Andover and Yale University. He was an editor at Houghton Mifflin and Harper and Row and―for eighteen years―director of the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. He lives in San Francisco and Napa, where he is the director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. Leggett is the author of Ross and Tom and three novels. His articles and short stories have appeared in The New Republic, the New York Times, and Harper’s.