Word: saroyan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...handsome exit line today. Gary Gilmore, the murderer executed in Utah in 1977, managed a moment of brisk existentialist machismo when he told the warden, "Let's do it." There was a charm, a mist of the fey overlaying the terror, in the official last words that William Saroyan telephoned to the Associated Press before he died in 1981: "Everybody has got to die, but I have always believed an exception would be made in my case. Now what?" Last fall the British Actor John Le Mesurier dictated to his wife his own death announcement, which...
...William Saroyan play, Love's Old Sweet Song, offered a character who sold TIME subscriptions and reinforced his pitch by reciting the euphonious glories of the magazine's masthead ("Carlton J. Balliett Jr., Robert Cantwell, Laird S. Goldsborough . . ."). In 1977 an angry protest novel by Robert Coover, The Public Burning, described TIME, ironically, as the national poet laureate. In a current Broadway musical, My One and Only, the hero dreams of being on the cover of TIME. In a recent song Billy Joel is more ambiguous...
...that some transcendent revelation will descend on these characters as they sit and stew. The only revelation to be gleaned from the bulk of Lanford Wilson's plays, starting with The Hot I Baltimore, is that his characters are circusy clones of people originally conceived by William Saroyan, Tennessee Williams and William Inge. Their common plaint is that life has failed them, whereas it seems pellucidly clear that they have copped out on life...
...stringing Cheerios on a shoelace, then eating them. Pixrose Wilson, the ethereal urchin who attends The Wake of Jamey Foster, dreams of having a baby: half human, half sheep. Are they weird? Naaah, they are the most engaging bunch of eccentrics since the days of the young William Saroyan. Spend an evening with the Henley sorority and you will have the time of your life...
...William Saroyan, 72, prolific Armenian-American writer whose energetic works, notably the 1939 Pulitzer-prize play The Time of Your Life and the 1942 novel The Human Comedy, celebrated the vitality and diversity of the American spirit...