American writer of short stories, novels and plays, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940 for The Time of Your Life (1939), and in 1943 won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film The Human Comedy. When the studio rejected his original 240-page treatment, he turned it into a novel, The Human Comedy. Saroyan is regarded as one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.
In 1940, when Saroyan won the Pulitzer Prize in drama, he refused it. Saroyan had little formal education.
He had achieved immediate fame in 1934 with a short story, “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.” He published a book of short stories Love, Here Is My Hat (1938).
In 1952, Saroyan published The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills, the first of several volumes of memoirs. In 1978, Saroyan authored his autobiography.
In 1943, Saroyan married actress Carol Grace (1924–2003; also known as Carol Marcus), with whom he had two children: Aram, who became an author and published a book about his father, and Lucy, who became an actress. By the late 1940s, Saroyan’s drinking and gambling took a toll on his marriage, and in 1949, upon returning from an extended European trip, he filed for divorce. They remarried in 1951 and divorced again in 1952 with Marcus later claiming in her autobiography, Among the Porcupines: A Memoir, that Saroyan was abusive.
He died of prostate cancer on 18 May 1981 at age 72 in Fresno, California. On 31 August 2018, the William Saroyan House Museum was opened in the house where Saroyan lived for the last 17 years of his life in the city of Fresno.
Link to Wikipedia biography