Leon Surmelian

Leon Surmelian was born on November 24, 1905, in Trabzon, Trebizond Vilayet, Ottoman Empire to pharmacist Garabed Surmelian and Zvart Diradurian. Surmelian has noted that his father strongly supported Armenian-Turkish friendship, and was the only Armenian in Trabzon critical of Russia. His uncle, also named Leon, was a member of the Dashnak Armenian Revolutionary Federation while he was growing up. In 1915, during the Armenian Genocide, Surmelian lost both of his parents, but was adopted, along with his three siblings, by a Greek doctor who was a family-friend at the time. In 1916, eleven-year-old Surmelian boarded a Russian ship to Batumi, then Krasnodar. In 1918, after an armistice during the First World War, Surmelian arrived in Constantinople with a group of friends and later attended the Armash Farming School in Armash. After a brief year in Armenia, he returned to Constantinople and lived in an orphanage whilst he attended religious school. At the age of 16, he served as the assistant secretary to the Commissariat of the Interior. In 1922, the Armenian Union of Agriculture helped Surmelian move to America, where he earned his Bachelor of Science in Agricultural Administration degree from Kansas State University. == Career ==

Surmelian originally wanted to study agriculture in America to go back and reconstruct Armenia. Although he thought poetry wasn't the right way to carry out the task of helping one's country, he later described himself as an "engineer of the soul, just as in demand as a regular engineer in times of crisis." Surmelian died on October 3, 1995 and was buried in Forest Lawn Mortuary, in Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California. == Works ==

Joyous Light, Surmelian's first and only work in Armenian published in 1924, was well received globally. The book was republished by the Armenian Institute in London in 2018 with added photographs, a map and glossary. Apples of Immortality, published by the University of California Press in 1968, presented 40 Armenian folktales that, according to Surmelian, "only needed a little trimming and stitching" to make the book comprehensible to the non-Armenian. The 319-page book received mixed reviews and was praised for its artistic insight into the ways and beliefs of the Armenian people. Surmelian's rendition of the folktales included narratives where Armenian men had two brides, which critics found to be inaccurate given that Armenian women are traditionally monogamous. The book received critical acclaim for its ability to retain the poetic qualities, metaphors, images, and rhetoric of the reciters without depending on lyrical song to retain the reader's interest. Surmelian's last book, published in 1969, Techniques of Fiction Writing: Measure and Madness, tackles modern fiction writing using examples from Flaubert, Joyce, Dostoevsky, and Hemingway. The book is widely available online, and still used in classrooms today. == Influences ==

After his first work, Joyous Light, Surmelian abandoned writing in Armenian and only wrote in English. At the same time, Surmelian changed his first name from 'Levon' to 'Leon', dropping the 'v' associated with the Armenian name. Surmelian himself says that Austrian-Bohemian author Franz Werfel and fellow Armenian-American writer William Saroyan inspired him to tell the Armenian story in a different language. Saroyan would later go on to write the introduction to Surmelian's I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen, and Surmelian would eventually go on to be known as the most widely read Armenian-American author after Saroyan. == References ==