The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Faber Editions)

Introduced by Stephen Fry

William Saroyan

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Year: 2024
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780571383498
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

JACK KEROUAC: 'I loved him ... He just got me'
ARTHUR MILLER: 'The first to let it all hang out and write like a child in wonderland.'
KURT VONNEGUT: 'Still the greatest.'
JOSEPH HELLER: 'My primary inspiration.'
STEPHEN FRY: 'One of the most underrated writers of the century.'

Depression-era San Francisco, home to the lost souls of many races: immigrants, struggling writers and heartsick adolescents, collecting in automats, nightschools, movies and barbershops, working in vineyards, telegram exchanges and as salesmen - and always revelling in being alive.

A bestseller on publication in 1934, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze was the debut collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning (and rejecting) Armenian-American writer William Saroyan. Fusing Whitman's transcendence with the eccentric characterisation of Steinbeck and Salinger, and foreshadowing the rhapsodies of the Beats, his prose is a heart-expanding experience that intoxicates to this day.

Table of contents

• Landing Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Fore word blades of grass: by Stephen Fry
• The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze
• Seventy Thousand Assyrians
• Among the Lost
• Myself upon the Earth
• Love, Death, Sacrifice and So Forth
• 1 , 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8
• And Man
• A Curved Line
• Snake
• Big Valley Vineyard
• Aspirin Is a Member of the N.R.A.
• Seventeen
• A Cold Day
• The Earth, Day, Night, Self
• Harry
• Laughter
• The Big Tree Coming
• Dear Greta Garbo
• The Man with the French Post Cards
• Three Stories
• Love
• War
• Sleep in Unheavenly Peace
• Fight Your Own War
• Common Prayer
• The Shepherd’s Daughter
• About the Author
• Also in Faber Editions
• Copyright
• Faber Editions adverts