The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Faber Editions): Introduced by 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.'

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.

William Saroyan (1908-1981) was born in California, the son of Armenian immigrants who escaped from the genocidal Turkish Ottoman Empire. His father - a preacher and poet who became a farm labourer - died when Saroyan was three, forcing the children to be briefly placed in an orphanage. Saroyan left school at fifteen, determined to become a writer and supporting himself through odd jobs. His first story collection was an instant bestseller in 1934 and fame ensued (he's mentioned in Breakfast at Tiffany's!) It was followed by dozens of celebrated novels, stories and plays including The Time of Your Life - for which he refused the 1939 Pulitzer Prize on the grounds that commerce should not judge art - and The Human Comedy, which won a 1944 Academy Award for his screenplay. In the 1940s he worked for Columbia and MGM in Hollywood, as well as travelling through the Soviet Union and Europe. Saroyan lived mainly in Paris from 1958, writing voraciously until his death in 1981.

Stephen Fry was born in London in 1957 and educated at Cambridge, where he joined the Footlights and met Hugh Laurie. His television credits include A Bit of Fry and Laurie, Jeeves and Wooster, Blackadder and QI, and he is a regular contributor to radio shows and films as well as the audiobook narrator for Harry Potter. Fry is also the author of many bestselling novels, including The Liar, The Hippopotamus, Making History and The Stars' Tennis Balls, as well as a series of autobiographies - Moab is my Washpot, The Fry Chronicles and More Fool Me - and Mythos, Heroes and Troy, his retellings of Greek myths.