The alley named after him is home to a famous North Beach dive bar
By Greg Keraghosian, Senior Homepage Editor April 14, 2025 - San Francisco Examiner
You wouldn’t know to look at it now, but the Academy Award that sits in a small San Francisco office above a bank has been through enough adventure, distress and mystery to warrant a movie of its own.
That Oscar went missing, with no one knowing for sure how long, before reappearing in a Mission District pawn shop window. The widely celebrated local writer who first won it had reportedly used it as a garage doorstop or hat holder after a legendary clash with the film’s studio head.
It wasn’t the only award William Saroyan disdained, either. His most visible San Francisco legacy today is a North Beach alley that’s named after him, but in his prime, he was a walking landmark and a charismatic nightlife fixture. Saroyan coined his own literary style and found overnight stardom while writing from a second-floor flat next to Kezar Stadium — and then made and lost fortunes due to a gambling dependency he openly acknowledged.
“I certainly didn’t gamble away every penny,” he wrote in a 1961 memoir. “… I drank some of it away, and I bought a raincoat.”
Even Saroyan’s frustrations over his Oscar for writing 1943’s “The Human Comedy” stemmed from a gamble on himself that didn’t pay off.
Before writing that script, Saroyan was already an immense literary success story. The child of Armenian immigrants, at the age of 3, Saroyan lost his father to an illness and spent the ensuing five years in an Oakland orphanage before reuniting with his mother. His day jobs in San Francisco before becoming a full-time writer included serving as the youngest Postal Telegraph office manager in the country, when he was in his early 20s.
The San Francisco writer who turned down a Pulitzer and used his Oscar as a doorstop
Greg