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The William Saroyan Foundation

Established by William Saroyan December 30, 1966

Stanford University Libraries and the William Saroyan Foundation

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THE SAROYAN PROGRAM AT STANFORD UNIVERSITY: Time exacts its toll on the legacies of authors and other artists. As often as not, the years after the passing of cultural figures are ones of continued clamor and popular connection to their works. In many cases, something like a fallow period occurs. Memorials or reflections on the life and works are uttered, a few projects continue, published works are republished, but something like a decent period of silence is observed while a new kind of momentum develops. 

For William Saroyan, as robust a writer as there ever was, the decent silence is being broken. Thanks to the decision of the William Saroyan Foundation to give permanently and irrevocably the William Saroyan archive and literary property rights it owned to Stanford, a series of activities have been set in motion to assist and promote the rebirth of interest in Saroyan and his works. This publication of several letters from Saroyan to Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, Robert E. Sherwood, Sean O'Faolain and H. L. Mencken is intended to whet the interest of scholars and students of twentieth-century American literature by hinting at the wealth of source materials on a wide swath of the authors and dramatists of the American canon. There is much, much more beyond this sample in the Saroyan Collection. Those interested in Saroyan for himself will of course find his mother lode here. Those interested in California in the tumultuous years of the middle of this century will find material in the Saroyan papers. Scholars of the creative process will be especially well served by Saroyan's self-conscious devotion to understanding how and why he and others are driven to write, to tell stories, to express the anguish and hilarity of humankind. What a treasure trove this is!

Stanford is committed as well to supporting in some new ways the growth of sensitive and sensible reading and writing. Under the auspices of the agreement with the William Saroyan Foundation, we will sponsor a prize for writing, one that promises to cover the variety of genres in which Saroyan he wrote. We are establishing a pair of curatorships to honor the originator and the Foundation. The first is a "chaired" curatorship, the William Saroyan Curatorship for American and British Literature, whose first incumbent will be the incomparable William McPheron. Its mate is the Honorary curatorship of the William Saroyan Archive which will be held by Robert Setrakian, the creative and thoughtful president of the Saroyan Foundation as well as the executor of Saroyan's estate. It is due to the desire of Bob Setrakian to honor and to protect Saroyan and his literary legacy that the gift to Stanford and the whole program of activities in the Stanford University Libraries has come about.

Saroyan's papers and other material will be in good company at Stanford. His archive joins similar collections of John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Denise Levertov, and Robert Creeley, among others. Saroyan's papers will provide source materials for Stanford professors and students and inevitably have become a draw for their counterparts from other institutions.

There is good evidence that Professor Yvor Winters and his wife, poet and novelist Janet Lewis, included William Saroyan in Sunday afternoon gatherings of writers at their home near the Stanford campus, encouraging Saroyan to publish his works and assisting him in placing them. That Saroyan's papers have come in the fullness of time to Stanford is in a way completing a cycle.

MICHAEL A. KELLER
University Librarian, Stanford University
May 1997

A MASTER OF MANY LITERARY GENRES: William Saroyan was born in Fresno, California in 1908, the youngest child of recent Armenian immigrants. Only nine when he first dreamed of becoming a writer, by his thirteenth birthday Saroyan had apprenticed himself to the craft. He read widely at the local public library, enrolled in Fresno's Technical High School to learn speed typing, and by his early twenties was producing manuscripts with furious discipline.

It was Saroyan's short stories that first brought fame. The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (I934) was an instant best seller and catapulted Saroyan to national celebrity. Other collections followed through the 1930s, culminating in 1940 with My Name Ts Aram. These tales magically evoke Saroyan's Armenian-American boyhood and confirmed his reputation as one of American literature's classic short story writers.

Broadway was the site of a second triumph. Saroyan's first New York play, My Heart's in the Highlands (1939), boldly declared a fresh and innovative talent in American theater. When, the next season, The Time of Your Life (1939 - 1940) won both the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, Saroyan was on his way to becoming a major American playwright.

In 1943 came The Human Comedy, Saroyan's long-anticipated first novel. Offering a poignantly idealized image of the American small town during World War II, it celebrated the goodness of humanity and its ability to overcome fear and loss. The novel evolved from a screen script that Louis Mayer commissioned from Saroyan. Both Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film and book versions of The Human Comedy were immensely popular.

Through the late 1940s and 1950s Saroyan concentrated on novels, though new volumes of short stories also occasionally appeared and Saroyan plays, both revivals and premiers, were still staged on Broadway as well as in London. Then in the early 1960s, Saroyan turned to an entirely different genre, the personal memoir. Beginning with Here Comes There Goes You Know Who (1961) and continuing through Obituaries (1979) and the posthumous Births (1983), Saroyan produced a series of radically original works of reminiscence and meditation, which only recently have begun to receive serious critical attention.

Short story writer, dramatist, novelist, and memoirist - these are the familiar and famous facets of William Saroyan's achievement. But there are also unknown aspects of his creative life, entire other dimensions that lie hidden in the unpublished papers of the William Saroyan Collection. Among the most interesting of these is Saroyan the writer of letters. He was, indeed, a prolific and conscientious correspondent, carefully saving incoming mail and often making carbon copies of his own replies.

As a writer of letters, Saroyan has barely been glimpsed in print. His correspondence from 1934 to 1978 to Hairenik, the Armenian-American periodical, was edited by James H. Tashjian for the Armenian Review, and a set of letters to fellow Armenian- American writers and critics appeared in Ararat. Both of these projects demonstrate the potential benefit to Saroyan's readers of the publication of further selections of his letters. His family, friends, editors, publishers, and business agents - all were crucial focal points in his life and correspondence, and each offers rich and abundant materials to prospective editors.

WILLIAM McPHERON, Retired
William Saroyan Curator for American and British Literature 

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  01/16/2008