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Whereas second-generation Italian American writers such as John Fante and Pietro di Donato have been rediscovered and are enjoying a certain vogue, first-generation Italian Americans who wrote in Italian are easier to overlook. Marazzi (State Univ. of Milan) offers a critical anthology of the so-called great migration decades (1880-1920) along with observations on journalism (the first Italian newspaper in the US, L’eco, was founded in NY in 1849), the relations of Italians and blacks, and the indifference of the Italian intelligentsia to the concerns of the emigrants. Some of the writers are so little known that biographical details are scant (included here, for example is the work of sonneteer Alfredo Borgianini, who “seems to have arrived in the United States in 1907”; one-time novelist Menotti Pellegrino, “perhaps a Sicilian”; and Dora Colonna, who wrote of seduction and abandonment in the roaring twenties, known only as a teacher who was conventionally attractive). Best known perhaps is union rhetorician, poet, and playwright Arturo Giovannitti (1884-1959), who started out as a Protestant minister in the mining towns of Pennsylvania and came to view himself as the bard of Italian American working people. Summing Up: Essential. Collections supporting study of the literature or history of Italian Americans; upper-division undergraduates through faculty and general readers.

J. Shreve, Allegany College of Maryland
Choice, January 2005