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.' 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.