American Italians in Literature

Helen Barolini

John Ciardi

Gregory Corso
Pascal D'Angelo
Don DeLillo

Pietro Di Donato
John Fante
Jerre Mangione
Richard Russo

John Ciardi (1916-1986)

A recipient of countless awards and many Doctorates, he was not too pleased with the "dull plaque" that passed as a gold medal from the Dante Alighieri Society of Massachusetts in 1978.
John Anthony Ciardi was born at 25 Sheafe Street in the North End of Boston on June 24, 1916 to Italian immigrant parents from the province of Avellino. His father Carmineantonio was from San Potito Ultra, and his mother Concetta de Benedictis was from Monocalzati (the name was to serve as a title to one of Ciardi’s poems). They had four children: Ella, Cora, Edith, and John.
     In 1919 Carmineantonio, who worked as an agent for Metropolitan Life, was killed in a car accident on the way to a sales function. The driver had been one Cavalcante. The first line of the poem Elegy III, Cavalcante begins : "It was Cavalcante," my Mother said, "killed you father. …" This incident was to leave its mark on John’s life. Soon after his father’s death they moved to 84 South Street in Medford, on the east side of the Mystic River. They had been building the new house and were planning on moving there with the bother-in-law Alessio De Simone known as Alec the barber. It was this uncle Alec that John Ciardi credits with teaching him to read Italian. Alec read regularly the Italian paper Il Messaggero.
     Ciardi recalled that Medford was a "leafy, elmy, sprawly semi-rural town." He used to go across the street to swim in the Mystic River which "was clean enough to drink." Today South Street is still a tree-lined street alongside the River. Many things have changed since the twenties, but the home remains the property of the Ciardi-Fennessey family (Fennessey is John’s sister Cora’s married name. Her son Tom Fennessey explained all this to me). A grandniece, who lives there now, reads John Ciardi’s children stories to her child.
     Ciardi attended the Medford public schools. From the first day of school he was to accept a new pronunciation of his name "Sea-yardi." After the Craddock and Dame Elementary Schools he went on to Hobbes Junior High and to Medford High School where he graduated 1933 at seventeen.
     He received his first Communion and Confirmation at St. Joseph’s on High Street, across the Mystic River from his house. Medford was mostly populated by Irish, and the brand of Catholicism he found there was dramatically different from that of St. Leonard’s in the North End. This cultural difference was to leave a negative impact on him. Since he could not afford college, he went to work as a florist at Sears Roebuck and as a caddy at the Winchester Country Club (One of his sons, an attorney, now lives in Winchester, Mass.).
     The following year he attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine (a friend there was Edmund Muskie, the future U.S. Senator). Although he did not have a successful academic year there, he was mentioned by Louis Untermeyer, as one of the poets in a lecture on "Six Prominent Young Poets". Due to the experience at Bates and lack of money, Ciardi transferred to Tufts University in his hometown where he could literally walk to school. At Tufts he came under the influence of the poet John Holmes who became his mentor. He graduated Magna Cum Laude in 1938, and received his first major recognition with the prestigious $1,200 Avery Hopwood Award for poetry for study at the University of Michigan. Here he completed his first book of poems, Homeward to America (1940). That same year he attended Bread Loaf on a fellowship, sharing that honor with first-time authors Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers. At the time, Ciardi was an instructor in English at Kansas State University where he had been recommended by Louis Untermeyer.
     In 1942, he enlisted in the Army Aviation Training. He was dismissed just before graduation under charges that were never fully established. The Army had marked him as a PAF (Pre-mature Fascist) for he had called for he abolition of the House un-American Committee. There had been also disciplinary reasons for his dismissal, but they had developed so suddenly when all along he had been given excellent reports. In any case Ciardi went on to bombardier school. He served with distinction in the war against Japan winning the Air Medal and Oak Leaf Cluster as an aerial gunner aboard a B-29. His combat experiences led to his second book, Other Skies (1947). The Army finally closed his file in 1943.
     The FBI however continued investigating him till 1970. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover personally earmarked Ciardi for possible arrest because he was a writer. In April 1965 when Lyndon Johnson invited Ciardi to a White House dinner, for security the FBI sent over a one-page dossier. It was full of unfounded charges like the one that he was a ``self-confessed Communist'', yet the report didn't mention that every single FBI informant inside the Communist Party had denied Ciardi was a party member or that that many people heralded his loyalty, that he had wartime decorations, and that he was a big FBI critic. In any case the Ciardis went to dinner at the White House.
     His wife Judith (died 1992) said ``Anyone who read all his poetry would have seen he had a great love for this country, and none at all for countries restricting freedom of speech.'' It was during his teaching at Kansas State that John met Judith Hostetter, a student who would become his wife (they would have three children, Myra, Jonnel, and Benn).
     Ciardi accepted an appointment at Harvard University in 1946, where he held the Briggs Copeland professorship; there, his colleague, Theodore Morrison, would extend an invitation to teach poetry at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury, Vermont. Thus began a tie which would last some twenty-six years. In September 1955, at the urging of many including poet Robert Frost, Ciardi became the Director of Bread Loaf, a post he held till 1972.
     During much of the time Ciardi was teaching at Harvard (and later, at Rutgers University), he also served as Poetry Editor at the eminent magazine of letters, The Saturday Review, a post which he held from 1956 to 1972. His criticism won him possibly more enemies than friends, but he was firm in his imposition of high standards for poetry and literary criticism.
     Of poetry he said: "I like stanza patterns; I like rhyme. And I have a feeling that one of the reasons [some poets] do not take on rhyme is that they can’t handle it. What is missing from most American poets is that they won’t take on the difficulties of form. They have to tell me what they feel - I don’t care what they feel. I’m interested in what I feel when I am reading a poem…The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it." He was proud that some of his poems have been translated into Russian by Andrei Sergeiev.
     In 1954, Ciardi issued his translation of Dante's Inferno. He went on to translate the Purgatorio and the Paradiso publishing the entire three volumes in 1970. The translation, while not following Dante’s terza rima, it is still rhymed. The work remains a bestseller. Another book, now forgotten (Mid-Century American Poets, 1950, an anthology incorporating work of Roethke, Bishop, and Lowell), greatly influenced an entire generation of poets.
     He has written over forty books. From 1958 to 1966 he wrote ten books in children’s verse. This was during the time that his own children were growing up. Three more children’s books were published posthumously. Six of the first books were illustrated by his Harvard student Edward Gorey. He won several awards for children’s literature.
     For a time from 1961 to 1962 he hosted "Accent", a weekly cultural television program on CBS. From 1977 until his death in 1986 he did a program called "A Word in Your Ear" on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition in which he clearly showed his love for words. But the activity that busied him the most was the lecture circuit which provided him with a substantial remuneration. His lectures were "electrifying, delivered in a measured, yet powerful manner," with "his frequent potshots…well aimed-always at the stupid, cruel, dangerous."
     In 1969 Ciardi was made honorary citizen of his mother’s hometown Monocalzati in the province of Avellino. The then mayor, Arturo De Masi, had a bronze plaque installed on which is quoted the poem about Monocalzati. Of his being Italian Ciardi said: "I am not Italian in my moods and sources. Even my command of the language is inadequate. Yet, oddly, I always and instantly have a sense of understanding the feelings of the Italian, especially of the contadino….they are the feelings, the attitudes, the preconceptions I have always known in my parents and relatives. I have often felt sad, in fact, that my daughter and my sons can never know those feelings."
     Exactly thirteen years ago, on Easter Sunday, March 30, 1986, John Ciardi died of a heart attack suffered at his home in Metuchen, New Jersey.
(Much of the material for this article is from Ciardi’s biography by Edward M. Cifelli, 1997, 592 pages)

Credibility

Who could believe an ant in theory?
a giraffe in blueprint?
Ten thousand doctors of what's possible
could reason half the jungle out of being.
I speak of love, and something more,
to say we are the thing that proves itself
not against reason, but impossibly true,
and therefore to teach reason reason.
(From the collection In Fact)

Gregory Nunzio Corso (1930-2001)

Gregory Corso, one of the circle of Beat poets that included Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac died in Robbinsdale, Minnesota on January 17 at 70 due to complications from prostate cancer, said his daughter, Sheri Langerman, with whom he had been living since September.
     Gregory Nunzio Corso was born March 26, 1930, to teen-age parents who separated a year after his birth. His own biographical notes in a compilation called ``The New American Poetry'' give a sample of his style and the early hardship of his life:

``Born by young Italian parents, father 17 mother 16, born in New York City Greenwich Village 190 Bleecker, mother year after me left not-too-bright father and went back to Italy, thus I entered life of orphanage and four foster parents and at 11 father remarried and took me back but all was wrong because two years later I ran away and caught sent away again and sent away to boys home for two years and let out and went back home and ran away again and sent to Bellevue for observation ...''

He bounced in and out of foster homes and jails and never made it to high school. When Mr. Corso was 16 he returned to jail to serve a three-year sentence for theft. It was then that he read the classics — Dostoevsky, Stendhal, Shelley and Christopher Marlowe among others — but also became, as he expressed it, "educated in the ways of men at their worst and at their best."
     Mr. Corso was released from prison in 1950. Soon after, at a bar in Greenwich Village, he encountered Ginsberg who introduced him to long Whitmanesque lines and surreal word combinations. At this time in his life, Mr. Corso was traveling the country, working as a laborer, as a reporter for The Los Angeles Examiner and as a merchant seaman.
     In 1954 he settled briefly in Cambridge, Mass., where he virtually took up residence at the Harvard University library, poring over the great works of poetry. His first published poems appeared in the Harvard Advocate, and his play, "In This Hung-Up Age," a macabre drama about how a group of tourists are trampled to death by a herd of buffalo, was performed the next year by Harvard students.
     Mr. Corso moved to San Francisco in 1956 too late to attend Ginsberg's famous reading of "Howl" but in time to be recognized as a major Beat poets. With Ginsberg he wrote a manifesto, "The Literary Revolution in America," in which they announced their convention-bashing.
     While Mr. Corso was never as politically involved as some of the other Beats, in 1965 he was dismissed from a teaching position at the State University of New York at Buffalo because he refused to sign an affidavit certifying that he was not a member of the Communist Party.
     In recent years, Mr. Corso continued to write, teach and lecture. He published 13 books of poetry, two books of plays and several collaborations. Allen Ginsberg called him "a great word-swinger, first naked sign of a poet, a scientific master of mad mouthfuls of language." He once told an interviewer for Contemporary Authors: "Sometimes hell is a good place — if it proves to one that because it exists, so must its opposite, heaven, exist. And what was heaven? Poetry."
     Corso was the author or co-author of more than 20 collections of poetry and other works. His first poems were published in 1955. One of his best-known works was the 1958 poem ``Bomb,'' an ode to atomic weapons in the shape of a mushroom cloud. Other poems from his collections are ``Gasoline,'' and ``Mindfield.'' But most critics agree that his finest poem is "Elegiac Feelings American," which is an elegy for his friend Kerouac and for dead notions of America and a new hope:

"O and yet when it's asked of you `What happened to him?'
I say, "What happened to America has happened
to him — the two were inseparable" Like the wind
to the sky is the voice to the word. . . . "

Corso was married three times. In addition to his daughter Ms. Sheri Langerman of Minneapolis, he is survived by his second wife, Belle Carpenter of Santa Fe, N.M.; two other daughters, Miranda Schubert of Manhattan and Cybelle Carpenter of Minneapolis; two sons, Max Corso of Guam and Nile Corso of Hamden, Conn.; his mother, Margaret Davita of Trenton; a brother, Joe Corso of Long Island; seven grandchildren; and a great-grandchild.
     Poet Robert Creely, (originally from Arligton, MA) reported that a wake was held on Bleeker Street, directly across from the house where he was born. The Italian government gave permission for his ashes to be interred in the English cemetery in Rome with Shelley.

Last October 1999, seventy-five years after the initial publication in English of Pascal D'Angelo's Son of Italy (New York: Macmillan, 1924), the book received its publication in the first ever translation in Italian, the mother tongue of the writer from Abruzzi considered by many to be the first great writer to emerge from that mass migration from Italy at the turn of the century. The book's official presentation took place in the small town from which he emigrated almost a century ago. Present at the ceremony were the Italian editor Antonio Corbisiero, Prof. Luigi Fontanella of New York State University, Stony Brook, the Mayor Orlando Orsini, and Prof. Rino Panza, a scholar of Pascal D'Angelo.

Pasquale D'Angelo was born in Introdacqua, a small town near Sulmona in the province of L’Aquila in the Abruzzo region. Pasquale emigrated to the USA with his father in 1910 and soon worked at a variety of jobs as a "ditch digger." He suffered many physical and psychological hardships before he decided he was going to learn this new language and learn more about what this country had to offer.

When his father decided to return to Italy, as many other Italian immigrants would during those years of mass migration, he decided to stay and make it in this country, not as a "ditch digger", but as a writer. In 1919 he moved to New York, abandoned manual work and dedicated himself exclusively to writing. In the meantime he continued to work indefatigably at teaching himself English. He lived in the most primitive of conditions, for a while even out of a boxcar where he would paste the walls with lists of new English words to memorize. During the times of greatest struggle he lived in a cold water room that could be entered only through a small bathroom used by the ten families in the tenement.

Originally he wrote poems that he read to his friends and co-workers. Then he sent them to various magazines, but they were all rejected. Even the Italian publications refused him saying that they only published known authors. What kept him trying again and again was seeing the mediocre poems that he saw in print. This gave him hope, as he always thought his literary output was of a much better quality.

His efforts were superhuman. He suffered through cold and starvation but he never gave up. Finally, the letter he wrote to The Nation so moved its editor Carl van Doren to state: "This letter is the cry of a soul stranded on the shores of darkness looking for light…I am worker, a pick and shovel man - what I want is an outlet to express what I can say besides work….There are no words that can fitly express my living sufferings…Let me free! Let me free! Free like the thought of love that haunts millions of minds…Then let my soul break out of its chrysalis of forced ignorance and fly toward the flower of hope, like a rich butterfly winged with a thousand thoughts of beauty."

Van Doren wrote later in the preface to Son of Italy: "If this was not an authentic cry, I had never heard one…As soon as I could I arranged a meeting with the poet." He quickly discovered that "The uplands of Abruzzi sent to America not another laborer, not another contractor, not another politician, but another son of that Ovid whose fame is still the glory of Sulmona. No American hereafter, watching a gang of brown Italians busy in a ditch can help asking himself whether there is not some Pascal D’Angelo among them…"

Son of Italy, a recounting of his life in the USA, was reviewed in the New York Book Review, The New York Evening Post, the Literary Review and of course The Nation. As a result offers poured in from various publishing houses and magazines. But Pascal did not take advantage of his new found fortune. He did not want to give up his art and sell his poetic soul to work as an editor on some magazine. His struggle continued followed by more privations. He died in 1932 at the age of 38.

Now Il Grappolo (www.ilgrappolo.it), a publishing house from S. Eustachio di Mercato San Severino, in the province of Salerno, has started a new initiative, first ever, called RADICI - Collana di Testimonianze Letterarie Italiane all'estero (ROOTS - A series of Italian literary works from outside Italy), which intends to publish translations of literary works, not only by Italian Americans, but by all Italians of the "diaspora" throughout the world. The Italian version keeps the English title Son of Italy, to keep the force of the original and the sense of identity of the writer who said: "I had started writing in Italian, but not having complete knowledge of the language, I decided to write in English."

Furio Colombo, writer and journalist defines Son Italy "a singular document, pages full of moving passages unknown in Italy till now." He added, "These are pages that should be read by some deputies and senators of the Italian parliament who continue to deny the problem of recognizing the original identity of the Italian diaspora throughout the world…"
The Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno, in its review, states that "The fascination with Son of Italy is in the conflict between the experience of deep desperation and the attachment, almost mythical, to hope, between extreme material poverty and the powerful attraction toward the beauty of the universe, between the hellish human existence reduced animalistic survival and the aspiration toward the sublime power of the written word."

Fred Gardaphé, who is also an Italian American writer himself, said: "Pascal D'Angelo, who could have been my grandfather, recorded his struggle to become an American poet in his autobiography, Son of Italy. To Americans, as D'Angelo wrote, 'I was a poor laborer -- a dago, a wop or some such creature.' That a ditch digger could become a poet was beyond belief for most American readers of the time.

Don DeLillo (1936 -     )

Valparaiso, a new play by Don DeLillo, considered by many to be one of the great American writers, will premier at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge. The play, directed by David Wheeler, will run from January 29 - March 17, 1999. It concerns "a man who took the wrong plane to a mysterious destination (who) now finds himself the obsessive focus of interviews and talkshows. This unnerving experience leads him (and the audience) to profound revelations about human nature and our own culture."
     This is not the first DeLillo play to be produced by the ART. The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven, a two page piece was first performed in April 1990 as part of a festival of one-minute plays. The Day Room also was first produced by the American Repertory in April 1986, directed by Michael Bloom. Robert Brustein, the Artistic Director of the A.R.T. has been quoted as saying that he has "stumbled on a dramatic genius similar to [Luigi] Pirandello."
     But DeLillo is not only a playright. He is better known as the writer of great American Novels such as, White Noise, Libra, Mao II, and more recently Underworld, considered by some as the "Moby Dick" of the twentieth century. Underworld is the first novel to take into account the whole historical significance of American culture during the Cold War. It captures the American Zeitgeist in all its forms including a sixty page account of the final game of the 1951 Dodgers-Giants playoff series at the Polo Grounds. "The shot heard round the world" that decides the series goes over the wall just after J. Edgar Hoover (at the game with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and Toots Shoor) has been informed Clyde, his faithful homoerotic G-man companion, that the Russians have successfully tested a nuclear device within their own borders. So with one "cold shot" we see the beginning of the Cold War and the end of the Dodgers pennant hopes (and in NY, NY, the second event is bigger news than the first.)
     In an article in the A.R.T. News DeLillo, in an attempt to relate the current play Valparaiso to his latest novel Underworld, explains: "The novel Underworld is about the Cold War years in America. The play, it seems, is an attempt to understand what is happening in the culture now that those years are over."
     Who is the creator of this American novel? He was born on Nov. 20, 1936. Except for a short stint in Pennsylvania when he was quite young, he was brought up in the Fordham section of the Bronx, a neighborhood of mostly Italian-Americans.
    His parents were born in Italy (Campania). His father, he recalls came to this country in 1916, when he was a young boy of nine. Eventually he went to work for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. Don grew up near Arthur Avenue, with its popular food shops and restaurants.
     At age eighteen he got a summer job as a playground attendant. It is during this time that he began to read literature while getting "paid for it" he mentions. He read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Light in August. It was through Joyce that he learned to see something in language that "made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history. And I'd look at a sentence in Ulysses or in Moby Dick or in Hemingway - maybe I hadn't gotten to Ulysses at that point, it was Portrait of the Artist - but certainly Hemingway and the water that was clear and swiftly moving and the way the troops went marching down the road and raised dust that powdered the leaves of the trees. All this in a playground in the Bronx."
     Mr. DeLillo attended Fordham University. But greater influences were to be found in New York itself. The paintings in the Museum of Modern Art, the music at the Jazz Gallery and the Village Vanguard, the movies of Fellini, Godard, and Howard Hawks.
     The year after he graduated, he got a job in advertising, because he couldn't get one in publishing.
     He quit his advertising job in 1964 and embarked on "[his] real life." He wrote some short stories for a time, but very infrequently. He began his first novel "around 1966. It took a long time, because I had to keep interrupting [it] in order to make a living." "I did all sorts of assignments. One day I would be writing about pseudo-colonial furniture, the next day about computers."
     He was sailing in Maine with two friends, and they put into a small harbor on Mount Desert Island. He was sitting on a railroad tie waiting to take a shower, and had a "glimpse of a street maybe fifty yards away and a sense of beautiful old houses and rows of elms and maples and a stillness and wistfulness - the street seemed to carry its own built-in longing. And I felt something, a pause, something opening up before me. It would be a month or two before I started writing the book and two or three years before I came up with the title Americana, but in fact it was all implicit in that moment. About halfway through Americana, which took roughly four years to do, it occurred to me almost in a flash that I was a writer."
     Before DeLillo got married in 1975, to Barbara Bennett, then a banker and now a landscape designer—he lived in a studio apartment in the Murray Hill section of New York. Then they lived in Toronto for a year around 1975, when she worked for Citibank. For three years while writing The Names Mr. DeLillo lived in Greece and traveled through the Middle East and India. When he came back to this country in 1982, he discovered "I began to notice something on television which I hadn't noticed before. This was the daily toxic spill--there was the news, the weather, and the toxic spill. This was a phenomenon no one even mentioned. It was simply a television reality. It's only the people who were themselves involved who seemed to be affected by them. No one even talked about them. This was one of the motivating forces of White Noise."
     One critic said that DeLillo "writes careful sentences. He pays attention to every word. He's got an almost mystic sense of the rhythms of language. He can write dialogue that somehow gets away with sounding hyper-real on the page, when in fact it's no more mimetic of the way people really talk than anything in Henry James. DeLillo didn't like the standard conventions, so he invented new codes."

Pietro Di Donato (1911-1992)

     Exactly fifteen years after the publication of the novel by Son of Italy by Pascal D'Angelo, another laborer, not a ditch digger, but a poor immigrant laborer nonetheless, appeared on the American literary scene with a similar novel depicting the "calvario" (Calvary) of the down trodden Italian immigrant. I say specifically "Calvary’ for this writer compares this worker to a Christ figure in his novel Christ in Concrete.
     Pietro di Donato was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1911 from immigrants from Abruzzi. He was a contemporary of John Fante, another writer born of immigrant ‘abruzzesi’. He became a bricklayer to take the place of his father who died tragically on Holy Friday in 1923. This was the event that marked him for life.
     First he wrote a short story called Christ in Concrete which told of the death of his young father in a construction accident. It was first published on 1937 in a magazine and then reprinted in the collection of Edward O'Brien Best Short Stories of 1938. The story later became the novel, by the same name, which was published in 1939.
     Di Donato had never intended to became a writer, but his novel was so successful that he quickly gained a national reputation. It was chosen as a of the Book of the Month Club over the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. In the first printing by Bobbs-Merrill it sold 200,000 copies in hard cover. It remained on the best-seller list for months and went into four different U.S. reprint editions. It was translated into eight European languages. A more recent reprint, 1993, is available with introduction by Fred Gardaphé and preface by Studs Terkel. There is also a film version of Christ in Concrete.
     The New York Times proclaimed Christ in Concrete a ‘stunning performance." The Los Angeles Times book reviewer dubbed it "one of the most beautiful, heartwarming, stirring books I have ever read."
     When I first read Christ in Concrete in a reprint by Bobbs-Merrill in 1976, I was overwhelmed by the power of the language which was raw yet lyrical. It felt like a timeless epic written centuries ago. The characters, all deeply etched with a strong passion evoke powerful images. The "Job," as he refers to it, is also a character in the book. Here is a description of the beginning of a day on the Job:

"… and the symphony of struggle began. The trowel rang through and slashed mortar rivets were machine-gunned fast with angry grind Patsy number one check Patsy number two check the Lean three check Julio four steel bellowed back at hammer donkey engines coughed purple Ashes-ass Pietro fifteen chisel point intoned stone this steel whirred and wailed through wood liquid stone flowed with dull rasp through iron veins and hoist screamed through space Rosario the Fat twenty-four and Giacomo Sangini check… The multitudinous voices of a civilization rose from the surroundings and melted with the efforts of the Job."

     Di Donato calls it a "symphony of struggle’ and it is just that. You can feel crescendo of the coming together of the full orchestra with jarring dodecaphonic sounds and then resolve to harmonious "voices of civilization."
     Di Donato is one of the few Italian American writers who became a member of the Communist Party at age sixteen on the night that Sacco and Vanzetti faced their execution, according to Fred Gardaphé. Unlike other Italian American writers who wrote of people’s struggle to become part of the mainstream of American life, Pietro di Donato rejected the American dream. He believed that American capitalism contributed to the disintegration of the Italian American family.
     He continued with the Christ myth in the sequel, This Woman, published in 1958. While it does not live up to the artistic level of the first novel, it nevertheless is an important continuation of the Di Donato’s literary journey through that undertaken by the young son, Paul, after the untimely death of his father. Paul/DiDonato refuses the American dream and the traditional Christ myth by taking the road ‘less traveled.’
     Before his death in 1992, Di Donato had finished another book The American Gospels in which Christ, in the guise of a black woman, comes on the earth at the end of the world to judge the more important current personages in America.
     Fred Gardaphé notes that the novel "Published during a time when the worker-writer was often posed as an American hero, Di Donato's novel has remained conspicuously absent in critical studies of American literature. Through his novel, I better understood what happened to me after my father was killed, and how I, at the age of 10, had suddenly become the man in the house."
     Helen Barolini comments that "Christ in Concrete is an achievement in giving literary form to the oral culture of the immigrant peasant transformed into urban worker. His is a prime example of the proletarian novel of the 1930s. It was written in the period of the depression, social protest, and growing interest in socialist solutions for the ills of the world and its workers. It was hailed, at its appearance, as ‘the epithet of the 20th Century.’
     Di Donato can be related to Clifford Odets, another writer of social protest, who had some influence on him. His work can be compared with the lyric proletarianism of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath and with John Fante's evocation of his mason father in The Brotherhood of the Grape. He created an American language that accommodated the oral culture of his protagonists, a language that reflects the texture of the peasant-worker discourse. It is important to note that dignity and intelligence are not the social prerogatives of the more articulate social group".
     When he died at the age of 80, Newsweek published a short blurb under their department heading Transition: " Died: Pietro Di Donato, 80, whose 1938 novel, "Christ in Concrete," was considered an American classic; of bone cancer, in Stony Brook, N.Y., Jan. 19, 1992".

John Fante (1909-1983)

John Fante was born in Colorado in 1909 from Italian immigrant father, a stone mason who emigrated from Toricella Peligna (Chieti), Abruzzo and a mother, born in Chicago from parents from Potenza, Basilicata.
     He began writing in 1929 and was first published in 1932 in H. L. Mencken’s The American Mercuy. Mencken helped the young Fante to further his own efforts in fighting the anglocentric New England literary establishment. Fante’s articles were soon to be published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar.
     His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938. The following year Ask The Dust appeared. In 1940 a collection of his short stories, Dago Red, was published.
     Meanwhile, Fante had become occupied extensively in screenwriting. Some of his credits include My Man and I (1952), directed by William Wellman and starring Shelly Winters, Ricardo Montalban, Claire Trevor. Jeanne Eagels (1953), starring Kim Novak, Jeff Chandler, and Agnes Moorehead. Full Of Life (1958),Judy Holliday, Richard Conte and the Italian Basso Buffo Salvatore Baccaloni. Walk On the Wild Side (1962), directed by E. Dmytryk and starring Jane Fonda, Barbara Stanwyck, Lawrence Harvey, and Ann Baxter. My Six Loves (1963), directed by Gower Champion and starring Debbie Reynolds, Cliff Robertson, and Eileen Heckart. Other films are The Reluctant Saint and Something for a Lonely Man.
     He conducted an extensive personal correspondence with H. L. Mencken. The letters were published in 1989 by Black Sparrow with the title John Fante & H. L. Mencken: A Personal Correspondence 1930-1952. In 1937 he met and married Joyce Smart who was a poet and editor. She was very influential in his life and continued to be important in the posthumous publishing of Fante’s work. John Fante was stricken with diabetes in 1955 and its complications brought about his blindness in 1978, but he continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and the result was Dreams from Bunker Hill. He died at the age of 74 on May 8, 1983.
     In 1985 Black Sparrow published The Wine of Youth, and two early novels, The Road to Los Angeles and 1933 was a Bad Year. Then in 1986 two unpublished novellas were brought out with the title West of Rome.
     Since he was rediscovered by the French literary world in the 1980s, many of his works have been translated in various languages. Italy has recognized him as one of their own; all his works have been translated into Italian. In Italy he earned the high praise of none other than Fernanda Pivano, an old friend of Cesare Pavese. His Waint until Spring, Bandini (Aspetta primavera Bandini) is compared to Fontamara of Ignazio Silone, another Abruzzese, in the way they make their characters speak.
     His novels are clearly autobiographical. On the character Arturo Bandini, he created a saga of four volumes of which the first is Wait Until Spring, Bandini. He tells the story of a young Italian who goes to California intent on leaving behind his family and his own ethnicity by becoming a writer. In Ask the Dust (1939), the second novel, Bandini actually abandons his home for California, again intent on becoming a famous writer. He now resolves to deny completely his ethnic roots. In Full of Life (1952) Arturo Bandini is married to an Italian-American and is awaiting his first child. Through his wife and his rapport with his father, Arturo is able to reconcile with his Italian heritage. In Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982) Fante returns to the times of Bandini of Ask the Dust and Arturo tries to start a career as a Hollywood screenwriter.
     In fact, Fante himself, though a great writer of novels, spent most of his life earning his living in the Hollywood studios. His greatest success there was the screen adaptation of his novel Full of Life which was nominated for an Academy Award. But his Hollywood experience never satisfied the novelist in him. He wrote about this experience in his novella My Dog Stupid published posthumously in West of Rome (1986). Wait Until Spring Bandini was adapted for the screen in 1989. It was produced by Frances Ford Coppola and directed by the Belgian Dominique Derrudere, starring Joe Mantegna and Fay Dunaway.
     Charles Bukovsky, who was responsible for having Fante published and republished by Black Sparrow Press, calls him his master, and Allen Ginsburg called him "a saint of literature."
     Today over 100,000 copies of his books have been sold in America since 1980 and an astounding half-million copies in France. He is having the success he longed for, but never achieved in his lifetime.
     Neil Gordon, in October/November 1993 article in the Boston Review quotes the critic Ben Pleasants, who while taping interviews with Charles Bukowski for a planned biography in the 70s, learned about Fante and became the first critic to write about him. In an interview with Gordon, Pleasants suggested that "Fante’s novels suffered under a double stigma. First of all, he was an Italian. I think there was a strong, nasty, anti-Italian bent at that time. And then also, in the 30s, there was the problem of politics. Fante, I wouldn’t say that he had clear political aims. And in the 30s, where you had a strong Marxist-Leninist bent, where a lot of the critics, Malcolm Cowley, for instance, were essentially Marxist-Leninist, this guy didn’t fit. He wrote about working class people but he didn’t raise the banner. So, he didn’t fit and they didn’t hold him up, because he wasn’t one of their boys."
     Then Gordon stating his own view writes: "His disturbing, singular writing stands absolutely alone among American Depression and mid-century writers. He was always the equal, and often the better, of his recognized contemporaries: Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, West, Schulberg. With no place in the genres of his day, it is only now that his finest work is being recognized as utterly original, and the precursor to voices of writers like Kerouac and Bukowski and through them, to a vast spectrum of contemporary writers".
     In the preface to the reissue of Wait until Spring, Bandini Fante writes: "Sometimes, lying in bed at night, a phrase or a paragraph or a character from that early work will mesmerize me and in a half dream I will entwine it in phrases and draw from it a kind of melodious memory of an old bedroom in Colorado, or my mother, or my father, or my brothers and sister. …and yet I cannot bring myself to look back,….Nothing of myself is there anymore, only the memory of old bedrooms, and the sound of my mother’s slippers walking to the kitchen."

Jerre Mangione (1909-1998)

Mangione is a writer of the Italian-American immigrant experience, died at 89 on August 16, 1998. He was born Gerlando Mangione in Rochester, New York, of Sicilian immigrant parents. His first book, Mount Allegro, published in 1943, was an account of growing up in that city with all the attendant struggles of an immigrant family. The neighborhood where Mangione grew up with his three brothers has been renamed Mount Allegro after the name of the Sicilian town Montallegro in the province of Agrigento.
     The book became a classic, had many reprints and was translated into many languages. This prompted Malcolm Cowley of the New York Times to send Mangione a personal letter in which he said "Mount Allegro has had more lives than any other book in our era." In 1981, on the occasion of one of the several reprints of the book, Mangione added a final chapter, stating that the history of Monte Allegro ended with the lives of the Sicilian immigrants who populated it. They made few friends outside the close Italian circle and lived in an ‘Italian environment’ by going to Italian doctors, dentists, lawyers, barbers, cobblers, etc. where everything was done in Italian. This, in Jerre’s mind disproved the ‘melting pot’ theory of Oscar Handlin of Harvard.
     Monte Allegro was translated into Italian upon its first publication, but recently, the book has been reissued by SEI Editors from Turin, and has been made part of the curriculum in Italian secondary schools. The Italian title is Mont’Allegro, Una memoria di vita italoamericana.
     After graduating from Syracuse University Mangione went to work for Time magazine and then became an editor on the Federal Writers' Project which produced guidebooks to the 48 states and employed writers such as Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Studs Terkel. Later he became a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he became emeritus professor of American literature upon his retirement in 1978.
     His other works include The Ship and the Flame (1948), Reunion in Sicily (1950), Night Search (1965), a book that deals with the assassination of the union activist Carlo Tresca, Passion for Sicilians: The World Around Danilo Dolci (1968), An Ethnic at Large: Memoirs of America in the 30's and 40's (1978). After his last work, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian-American Experience, co-written with Ben Morreale, the Library of Congress honored him in 1992 with a special exhibit of his works and papers. Among his many awards is the Premio Empedocle from the Italian literary world and from the Italian government the title of Commendatore for which he received the Stella della Solidarietà italiana.

Richard Russo (1950 -     )

Richard Russo was born and grew up in Gloversville, in New York’s Mohawk Valley. He attended the University of Arizona, later going on to get an M.A. in American literature and to do some work towards a PhD. He is the author of several novels, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody's Fool, which was made into a film directed by Robert Benton and starring Paul Newman. The portrayal of the main character earned Newman an Oscar nomination for best actor.
     Russo was teaching writing at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where he lives with his wife Barbara and their two daughters. After the success of Nobody's Fool and the ensuing film, he became a full-time novelist and screenwriter. He also wrote Newman's last picture, Twilight, (1998) and is working on the screenplay of his most recent novel, Straight Man, a comic novel about an English professor, Hank Deveraux, deep in the midst of a midlife crisis.
     Richard Russo's Italian-American heritage came to him through his father, a wage-earning workingman. Russo began his journey toward a noteworthy career as a writer in Johnstown, New York, and grew up in Gloversville. He made his way to the University of Arizona to work on his degrees. He completed his Bachelor of Arts Degree there, studied toward a Doctor of Philosophy Degree, and then completed a Master of Fine Arts Degree in 1981. During breaks from his studies he returned to the Mohawk Valley, to work on construction jobs by his father's side.
     Any viewer familiar with the decaying towns of The Mohawk River valley would have little trouble identifying the actual location of the action of Nobody's Fool. Russo has mastered the art of depicting the lives of the residents of towns like Gloversville and Johnstown -- their efforts to carry on as the industries that supported the growth of those towns go into decay, leaving the inhabitants to find a different life.
     One cannot doubt that Russo's keen insights into the life of wage-earning people comes from his own experiences during the time that he had been surrounded by that life. The sharp detail, the extensive explorations of the minds of his characters, his deep understandings of their psychological life, and the sympathetic perspective which Russo has extracted from those understandings, permeate every paragraph of his writing. One must conclude that Russo has few peers -- perhaps Saroyan and Steinbeck -- among those who have recorded the lives of the wage-earning workers of The United States.
     In describing how he became a writer, Russo remarked that "It wasn't so much that I wanted to write books, but I loved literature. Reading books about books wasn't nearly as much fun as reading books. I also discovered that the only people having fun were the creative writers. So, while in school working toward finishing my Ph.D., I wandered across the aisle where people seemed to be having fun and took a course in creative writing."
     According to the New York Times, writer Richard Russo is "a master at creating characters with the emotional weight of people we've known in real life. He has improved that ability with each of his novels. In his latest, Straight Man (1998 ), he has given us another unforgettable character in Hank. The title Straight Man derives from Hank's frequent comment, ‘In English departments the most serious competition is for the role of straight man,’ a notion that Russo -- his single flaw -- never adequately develops or clarifies. A more obvious, though admittedly infelicitous, title might have been ‘Occam's Razor,’ a concept that Hank raises so often as to make it a theme. The reference is to William of Occam, a fourteenth-century English theologian whose famous ‘razor,’ or principle of economy in logic, maintains that "entities [assumptions used to explain phenomena] should not be multiplied beyond what is needed.’ [A main character in Umberto Eco’s Il Nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) is based on William of Occam].
     "Russo begins the Epilogue with the epigram ‘For every complex problem there is a simple solution. And it's always wrong,’ H. L. Mencken wrote in ringing rebuttal to William of Occam. In Hank's treatment this gets reduced or diffused to a general idea of simplicity in all things. He calls himself a disciple of William and says that, like William and like physicists, ‘I'm seeking a unifying theory.’
     Finally, the character Hank, in reflecting about himself and his bickering colleagues muses that ‘We've preferred not to face the distinct possibility that if we'd been made for better things, we'd have done those things’."