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[Arpa]

Monday March 4, 2002

Author William Saroyan's ashes are buried in town that inspired him

FRESNO, California (AP) - The ashes of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer William Saroyan were laid to rest 20 years after his death, in the town that inspired his stories.
The burial Sunday came amid Fresno's first Saroyan Festival - held to honor the author, playwright and the city's most famous native son.

Half of Saroyan's ashes were sent to Armenia after he died at age 72 on May 18, 1981, and the other half had been sitting in obscurity on a Fresno chapel's shelf.

Saroyan's son, Aram, and daughter, Lucy, attended the burial service at a grave near railroad tracks on the outskirts of town. His children listened with some of his old friends as a minister from the First Armenian Presbyterian Church prayed over a black granite headstone.

Saroyan, of course, had written his own epitaph:
``In the time of your life, live - so that in that wondrous time you shall not add to the misery and sorrow of the world but shall smile at the infinite delight and mystery of it.''
The festival, which runs through May 5, includes theater productions, philharmonic concerts, museum exhibits and literary talks about Saroyan, who rose to literary heights in the 1930s and '40s.

Saroyan, who also won an Academy Award, was part of an Armenian family that came to Fresno in 1908 to escape persecution in Ottoman Turkey. His father, Armenak, was a minister and frustrated poet who died when William was 3.
Death became a central theme in Saroyan's work.
``Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep, really sleep,'' he once wrote to aspiring writers. ``Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.''
Saroyan was a struggling writer before getting a break in 1934 with the publication of his story ``The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze.''
He won the Pulitzer for his play ``The Time of Your Life,'' but rejected it because the play was ``no more great than anything else I have ever written.''
In 1943, he was awarded a writing Oscar for ``The Human Comedy.''
``Saroyan was a lot more than a short story writer,'' said Robert Setrakian, head of th William Saroyan Foundation in San Francisco. ``He worked in all the art forms and drew and painted almost every day.''

http://www.saroyanfestival.com