The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

William Saroyan

The best advice I ever got as a writer I got from Saroyan in the preface to his wonderful collection, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. I pass it along to you, to any young writer, whatever the age, who might need the reminder. Saroyan wrote: ‘The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell.’

Richard Rodriguez, News Hour with Jim Lehrer

The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

Fiction by William Saroyan

“This book was first published October 15, 1934…,” William Saroyan wrote of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. “You will have to take my word for it that I believed the world would never be the same.” Certainly, it never was. Saroyan’s debut collection of stories made a tremendous splash in the literary world, adding an author in love with his own madcap sincerity to a pantheon full of serious-minded modernists. “A novel is a novelist,” he wrote, “and a short story is a short story writer.” Saroyan, who won (and then refused) the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Time of Your Life, always wrote about humanity, and always on a human scale. He was also one of the first American writers of this century to focus so much attention on immigrant communities. The protagonists sailing about The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze are often Armenian, Jewish, Chinese, Polish, African, or Irish; and all are treated with what The San Francisco Chronicle called “the old Saroyan luminousness, which is to say with an insight as fresh as that of an unusually perceptive child.”

Buy The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze

Paperback(published Oct, 01 1997)

ISBN
9780811213653
Price US
15.95
Price CN
19
Trim Size
5x8
Page Count
272

William Saroyan

20th century American novelist and playwright

The best advice I ever got as a writer I got from Saroyan in the preface to his wonderful collection, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. I pass it along to you, to any young writer, whatever the age, who might need the reminder. Saroyan wrote: ‘The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell.’

Richard Rodriguez, News Hour with Jim Lehrer