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Growing up in an Armenian immigrant community in the San Joaquin Valley of California with both of his grandmothers as storytellers was a propitious circumstance for William Saroyan's career as a writer. Witnessing the behavior of an individualistic, free-spirited people who have endured for centuries the sadness of expatriation gave him immediately at hand the raw material of art. "I began to believe I was a writer when I was in the third grade at Emerson School in Fresno," Saroyan said, "and I began to be a writer when I was thirteen and had used up the better part of my first week's wages as a telegraph messenger in the buying of a secondhand upright Underwood typewriter."
Saroyan's father came to New York in 1905 from the mountainous Armenian-Kurdish town of Bitlis in eastern Turkey, eventually settling in Fresno, California, with its large population of Armenian-Americans. When Saroyan was three, his father, Armenak Saroyan, died, and William and his brother and two sisters had to leave their hometown of Fresno to live in an orphanage in Oakland.
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