United States to host William Saroyan Prize for Playwriting contest
30.01.2010 19:24 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ The Los Angeles-based Armenian Dramatic Arts
Alliance launches William Saroyan Prize for Playwriting contest. The
initiative was made possible by a grant from the William Saroyan
Foundation.

The grand prize is $10,000, with publicity and other prizes awarded to
the top three finalists.

William Saroyan: a XX century Armenian-American dramatist and author,
descendent of Armenian Genocide survivors. The setting of many of his
stories and plays is the center of Armenian-American life in
California in his native Fresno.

As a writer, Saroyan made his breakthrough in Story magazine with The
Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1934), the title taken from
the nineteenth century song of the same title. He published essays and
memoirs, in which he depicted the people he had met on travels in the
Soviet Union and Europe, such as the playwright George Bernard Shaw,
the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, and Charlie Chaplin. In 1952,
Saroyan published The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, the first of
several volumes of memoirs.

Saroyan’s stories celebrated optimism in the midst of the trials and
tribulations of the Depression. Several of Saroyan’s works were drawn
from his own experiences, although his approach to autobiographical
fact contained a fair bit of poetic license. Saroyan is probably best
remembered for his play The Time of Your Life (1939), set in a
waterfront saloon in San Francisco. It won a Pulitzer Prize, which
Saroyan refused on the grounds that commerce should not judge the
arts; he did accept the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award. The play
was adapted into a 1948 film starring James Cagney. In the novellas
The Assyrian and other stories (1950) and in The Laughing Matter
(1953) Saroyan mixed allegorical elements within a realistic novel.
Many of his later plays, such as The Paris Comedy (1960), The London
Comedy (1960), and Settled Out of Court (1969), premiered in Europe.
Manuscripts of a number of unperformed plays are now at Stanford
University with his other papers.