It’s the birthday of William Saroyan (1908-1981), who against crazy odds launched his literary career during the Great Depression with a series of short stories that became a bestselling collection, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories (1934), and who always wrote and lived with zest in spite of whatever hardships he and the nation faced.

Saroyan was born and raised in Fresno, California, to Armenian immigrants. His father died of a ruptured appendix when Saroyan was only a toddler, and he and his brother and two sisters spent several years in an orphanage in Oakland, California, before his mother was able to reunite the family in Fresno. (Saroyan later wrote that he’d hated the place, but that he couldn’t have been called an “abandoned lonely orphan” because he had his brother and sisters with him. So, let’s call this one step better than a British boarding school.)

Saroyan wanted to be a writer from the age of 12, thanks to the short story “The Bell” by Guy de Maupassant, but was not interested in college. As the Great Depression began, he focused on writing and earned money by selling vegetables at the market and by gambling. His first story, The Daring Young Man…, was accepted by the magazine Story in 1933 and garnered instant excitement: his writing was brash and invigorating and he wrote more stories and then plays as well, and people loved him until they didn’t. Which was sometime in the mid to late 1940s. But while they still loved him, his play The Time of Your Life won both the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer, and Saroyan turned down the latter because he felt commerce shouldn’t drive the arts and because he believed the play was “no more great or good” than his other works. (If I had a nickel for every Pulitzer I’ve turned down… actually nickels are hardly worth anything so it doesn’t bear thinking about.)

The 1940s were rough on Saroyan: he was a pacifist drafted into the army in 1942, he experienced a marriage that failed within about three years (he and his wife had two children in that time), and his literary career tanked. He tried more and more drinking and gambling, yet oddly things didn’t improve. But in the 1950s he managed to begin reversing the downward trajectory of his career and published his first work of autobiography, The Bicycle Rider in Beverly Hills (1952) and several more novels and short story collections. In 1958 he went to Europe and accrued a ton of gambling debts, yet felt that his gambling was good for his writing, as he wrote some of his best work “in the aftermath of a bad gambling experience.” (Heads up, Tim: I am *so* going to try this.) By the late 1960s, Saroyan’s financial situation had stabilized and he was living between Fresno and Paris (Ah, Fresno! The Paris of the western—never mind, it doesn’t work) and had a great reputation in Europe as a playwright. He continued to write fiction and memoirs as well, including his 1979 work, Obituaries.

Five days before Saroyan’s death from cancer in May, 1981, he called the Associated Press to provide a posthumous statement: “Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?” If that doesn’t make you want to read Saroyan, nothing will.

Have a vigorous Friday, live life to the full, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.