This book introduces the Essentials Collection that showcases celebrated California writers whose works have gained international recognition. This selection draws on the best of Saroyan's short stories, novels, drama, and autobiography.

"In late August of 1975 when my wife Gailyn and I and our one-and-a-half-year-old daughter arrived in Bolinas, I was almost 29 years old and had become known for writing minimal poetry sometimes consisting of a single word", Aram Saroyan writes in his introduction to Day and Night. "A young writer's ego is a delicate matter, subject as it is to routine battery and assault. When I wrote the first section of a long poem called 'Lines for My Autobiography' one afternoon on the typewriter in the poet Joanne Kyger's house. I was both exhilarated and uneasy. After all, it was two and a half pages long and I'd never before written a poem of even half its length. I ended up throwing it in the waste basket, but Gailyn fished it out, read it, and told me it was the best thing I'd ever written and to go on writing it". That poem and many others like it -- limpid, direct, revealing, open-hearted essays toward a first-person life story -- make up Saroyan's very appealing book about "big-city boys...becoming farmers" in an eccentric, idealist, crackpot-utopian California beach town in the 1970s. This is an unashamedly youthful book, starry-eyed in its approach to family-starting and community-founding, innocently celebrative of the simple wonders of a life lived close to nature. Glancing back at a glamorous but troubled childhood spent among the bright lights of Manhattan and the luxuriant palms of Beverly Hills, the young Saroyan experiences this new world with a freshness of vision.

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.

Once upon a time there was only one word — me. If you wanted to say here I am, you said — me. It was the only word anyone ever heard! But only people said me. Dogs said bark, bark, take me to the park; cats said purr, purr, I am the Queen be kind to her; cows said moo, moo, I am a cow, what are you? But slowly, change came, and in his first children's book, Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist William Saroyan spins a fanciful fable that speculates on how members of the human race actually started talking to each other. Recounted with catchy rhymes and a spirited simplicity, this story is illustrated with lively pictures that glow with the warmth of watercolors. An internationally renowned writer, playwright, and humanitarian, William Saroyan wrote short stories, plays, novels, memoirs, and essays. His tale of Me is illustrated by Murray Tinkelman, whose art has appeared in Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and many other prominent publications. Their charming children's story has been out of print for decades but now returns to circulation in this vibrant new edition.

An illustrated compilation of critical essays, intimate recollections, biographical notes, and interviews which sheds new light on the life and work of Pulitzer Prize winner William Saroyan (1913-81). Reflections by his son and daughter and a candid interview with Garig Basmadjian reveal the intimate side of the talented celebrity trying to cope with his human weakness.

All his life a man fights death, and then at last loses the fight, always having known he would. Loneliness is every man's portion, and failure. The man who seeks to escape from loneliness is a lunatic. The man who does not know that all is failure is a fool. The man who does not laugh at these things is a bore. Arak Vagramian, a handsome son of Armenian immigrants, contended with his small-town bar-tending job in Fresno, is one day spotted by a Hollywood filmmaker. Although at first he refuses to leave his hometown, job, family and friends, soon the splendour of Hollywood lifestyle lures him. Shortly after he becomes Rock Wagram – a Hollywood heart-throb and celebrity. But at the peak of his career he decides to enter the army and serve his country during the war. When in 1950 he attempts to resume his acting career he battles with the many challenges which the fast changing industry throws at him. Rock Wagram, first published in 1951, is an inspiring tale about one's search for the true identity in the unstable world of commercial success, where family ties and loyalties often have to be compromised.

In this work, the author tells how Saroyan transformed the short story by personalizing it and by loosening the structure of the novella form. He went on to bring new life to the theater and to the telling of autobiography. Better than that of any recent drama critic, Balakian's chapters on the theater place Saroyan's plays in the larger framework of the American theater of his time and achieve the creation of a total picture of the state of the American theater of the 1930s.