The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze (Faber Editions) : Introduced by Stephen Fry

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.