Posted inArt

Madness in My Family

When Saroyan, a biography of my father William Saroyan by Lawrence Lee and Barry Gifford, was published in 1986, I was coming off a five-year run during which I wrote three books about my family and couldn’t handle sitting down to read another word about them.

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Making the Cut: Remembering Warren Lyons

LOS ANGELES — In the late fifties and early-to-mid-1960s, when my father came to New York and checked into the Royalton for stays that varied in length from a few days to several weeks, he would run into his friend Leonard Lyons, the New York Post gossip columnist, who invariably wrote an item or two about him in his column, The Lyons Den.

Posted inArt

The Jewish Blues

LOS ANGELES — I first saw Saul Bellow in the early 1960s at a reading he gave one afternoon of his play “The Last Analysis.” The reading took place in a large, light-filled studio on the Upper West Side in New York, for an audience of invited guests.