Voices of Italian America

"This book presents for the first time in English a substantial choice of texts (excerpts from novels, short stories, memoirs, and poems), written in Italian by first-generation immigrants. Marazzi, a specialist in Italo-American cultural relations, introduces here the lives and works of a number of novelists, poets, activists, and journalists, who wrote for the myriad of newspapers published all around the country. There are authors of serialized novels (the "mysteries" of downtown Manhattan), N.Y.P.D. cops, and nationalists extolling the virtues of the Duce, as well as red anarchists, ladies, and "flappers" from the Italian American middle class, and proletarian rhetoricians. Their personal stories testify to a wider collective novel focused around the myth and the dream of "making America." Through their pages and their critical presentation, the reader is brought to discover the literary dignity of this production, clearly linked to the popular roots of nineteenth-century Italian culture, but at the same time confronted with the traumas and the different realities of a new society. The main themes are voiced - immigration, labor conditions, family ties, the lure and snares of the big city, its multiethnicity."--BOOK JACKET.