The daring young man on the flying trapeze, and other stories
William 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. 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."