The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

by William Saroyan

Overview

Saroyan’s debut collection of stories.

A timeless selection of brilliant short stories that won William Saroyan a position among the foremost, most widely popular writers of America when it first appeared in 1934.With the greatest of ease William Saroyan flew across the literary skies in 1934 with the publication of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories. One of the first American writers to describe the immigrant experience in the U.S., Saroyan created characters who were Armenians, Jews, Chinese, Poles, Africans, and the Irish. The title story touchingly portrays the thoughts of a very young writer, dying of starvation. All of the tales were written during the great depression and reflect, through pathos and humor, the mood of the nation in one of its greatest times of want.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811213653
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/17/1997
Series:	New Directions Classic
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	692,380
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)
Age Range:	12 - 18 Years

About the Author

William Saroyan (1908–1981) was born in Fresno, California. Famous for a long and voluminous career, he wrote novels, along with some sixteen story collections, and plays including The Human Comedy (winning an Academy Award for his screenplay), and The Time of Your Life, for which he won the Drama Critics Circle and Pulitzer Prizes. He wrote about "the archetypal Armenian families who inhabit Saroyan country, in and around Fresno, California. [And yet with their] unpredictable charm and wacky spontaneity … his characters overflow with so much human comedy that they transcend all ethnic boundaries, as in the stories of I.B. Singer" (The Chicago Tribune).

Table of Contents

Preface to the First Edition
The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze
Seventy Thousand Assyrians
Among the Lost
Myself upon the Earth
Love, Death, Sacrifice and So Forth
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
And Man
A Curved Line
Snake
Big Valley Vineyard
Aspirin Is a Member of the N.R.A.
Seventeen
A Cold Day
The Earth, Day, Night, Self
Harry
Laughter
The Big Tree Coming
Dear Greta Garbo
The Man with the French Post Cards
Three Stories
Love
War
Sleep in Unheavenly Peace
Fight Your Own War
Common Prayer
The Shepherd's Daughter

Editorial Reviews

<:st> Reprint of the 1934 original (which is cited in ). Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

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