Saroyan, William – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk Henley-on-Thames Fri, 14 Mar 2025 18:29:14 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-Bell-Background-Blue-32x32.png Saroyan, William – The Bell Bookshop https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk 32 32 The daring young man on the flying trapeze https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/the-daring-young-man-on-the-flying-trapeze/ Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.bellbookshop.co.uk/product/the-daring-young-man-on-the-flying-trapeze/ A Lost Great American Master: meet Jack Kerouac’s inspiration in these heart-expanding tales of immigrant life in 1930s USA, introduced by superfan Stephen Fry.

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.’

I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work.

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.

]]>