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The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Faber Editions)
A Lost Great American Master: meet Jack Kerouac’s inspiration in these heart-expanding tales of immigrant life in 1930s USA, introduced by superfan Stephen Fry.
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A Lost Great American Master: meet Jack Kerouac’s inspiration in these heart-expanding tales of immigrant life in 1930s USA, introduced by superfan Stephen Fry.
JACK KEROUAC: ‘I loved him … He just got me’
ARTHUR MILLER: ‘The first to let it all hang out and write like a child in wonderland.’
KURT VONNEGUT: ‘Still the greatest.’
JOSEPH HELLER: ‘My primary inspiration.’
STEPHEN FRY: ‘One of the most underrated writers of the century.’
I hadn’t had a haircut in forty days and forty nights, and I was beginning to look like several violinists out of work.
Depression-era San Francisco, home to the lost souls of many races: immigrants, struggling writers and heartsick adolescents, collecting in automats, nightschools, movies and barbershops, working in vineyards, telegram exchanges and as salesmen – and always revelling in being alive.
A bestseller on publication in 1934, The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze was the debut collection by the Pulitzer Prize-winning (and rejecting) Armenian-American writer William Saroyan. Fusing Whitman’s transcendence with the eccentric characterisation of Steinbeck and Salinger, and foreshadowing the rhapsodies of the Beats, his prose is a heart-expanding experience that intoxicates to this day.
I loved him ... He just got me.
The first to let it all hang out and write like a child in wonderland.
One of the most underrated writers of the century ... He takes his place naturally alongside Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner.
My primary inspiration.
Still the greatest of all the American minimalists.
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