The Time of Your Life: A Comedy in Three Acts

Saroyan won the Pulitzer Prize for this play however he declined to accept it with the belief that commerce should not patronize art. I wonder if he allowed the box office to sell tickets. I know he wasn't able to restrain the publisher from charging for my copy of this book. Although it's subtitled "A Comedy in Three Acts," I still struggle to identify the spots where you're supposed to laugh. Perhaps it's when this play once appeared in an anthology entitled Three Dramas of American Realism.

A collection of William Saroyan's best-known plays: "My Heart's in the Highlands", "Love's Old Sweet Song", "The Beautiful People", "Hello Out There", and the best of the bunch, "The Time of Your Life". Many of Saroyan's stories are about people somehow disconnected from life, and somehow expecting that their art will inspire the world to exempt them from the need to think about food, clothing and shelter. These stories have become kind of irritating to me, especially when they involve children who do most of the actual beg, borrow and steal to keep body and soul together. "The Time of Your Life", however, is actually quite a good and moving story.

Life has no meaning but maybe we can make some.

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