William Saroyan was an Armenian-American novelist, playwright, and short story writer. He was born on August 31, 1908, and passed away on May 18, 1981. Saroyan was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1940, and in 1943 he won the Academy Award for Best Story for the film adaptation of his novel The Human Comedy.

Saroyan wrote extensively about the Armenian immigrant life in California, with many of his stories and plays set in his native Fresno. Some of his best-known works include The Time of Your Life, My Name Is Aram, and My Heart's in the Highlands. His two collections of short stories from the 1930s, Inhale Exhale (1936) and The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (1941), are regarded as major achievements and essential documents of the cultural history of the period on the American West Coast.

He has been described as "one of the most prominent literary figures of the mid-20th century" and by Stephen Fry as "one of the most underrated writers of the 20th century." Kurt Vonnegut stated that Saroyan was "the first and still the greatest of all the American minimalists."