Furtherreading
Other info : Career | Bibliography
Personal life[edit]
Saroyan has a correspondence with writer Sanora Babb that began in 1932 and ended in 1941, that grew into an unrequited love affair on Saroyan's part.
In 1943, Saroyan married actress Carol Marcus (1924–2003; also known as Carol Grace), with whom he had two children, Aram, who became an author and published a book about his father, and Lucy, who became an actress. By the late 1940s, Saroyan's drinking and gambling took a toll on his marriage, and in 1949, upon returning from an extended European trip, he filed for divorce. They were remarried briefly in 1951 and divorced again in 1952 with Marcus later claiming in her autobiography, Among the Porcupines: A Memoir, that Saroyan was abusive. Artie Shaw, the famous jazz musician and author, who was close to both Carol Marcus and to William Saroyan, relates in great detail and with corroborating sources, that actually Saroyan's divorce from Carol Marcus was due to Saroyan's extremely virulent anti-Semitism, and Carol's confiding to him that she was "half-Jewish," after ten years of marriage. Saroyan generally concealed his raging anti-Semitism very well.
Carol subsequently married actor Walter Matthau.
Saroyan died in Fresno, of prostate cancer at age 72. Half of his ashes were buried in California and the remainder in Armenia atKomitas Pantheon near film director Sergei Parajanov.
