Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943

To appreciate the life of the Italian immigrant enclave from the great heart of the Italian migration to its settlement in America requires that one come to know how these immigrants saw their communities as colonies of the mother country. Edited with extraordinary skill, Italoamericana: The Literature of the Great Migration, 1880-1943 brings to an English-speaking audience a definitive collection of classic writings on, about, and from the formative years of the Italian-American experience.

Originally published in Italian, this landmark collection of translated writings establishes a rich, diverse, and mature sense of Italian-American life by allowing readers to see American society through the eyes of Italian-speaking immigrants. Filled with the voices from the first generation of Italian-American life, the book presents a unique treasury of long-inaccessible writing that embodies a literary canon for Italian-American culture—poetry, drama, journalism, political advocacy, history, memoir, biography, and story—the greater part of which has never before been translated.

Italoamericana introduces a new generation of readers to the “Black Hand” and the organized crime of the 1920s, the incredible “pulp” novels by Bernardino Ciambelli, Paolo Pallavicini, Italo Stanco, Corrado Altavilla, the exhilarating “macchiette” by Eduardo Migliaccio (Farfariello) and Tony Ferrazzano, the comedies by Giovanni De Rosalia, Riccardo Cordiferro’s dramas and poems, the poetry of Fanny Vanzi-Mussini and Eduardo Migliaccio.

Edited by a leading journalist and scholar, Italoamericana introduces an important but little-known, largely inaccessible Italian-language literary heritage that defined the Italian-American experience. Organized into five sections—“Annals of the Great Exodus,” “Colonial Chronicles,” “On Stage (and Off-Stage),” “Anarchists, Socialist, Fascists, Anti-Fascists,” and “Apocalyptic Integrated / Integrated Apocalyptic Intellectuals”—the volume distinguishes a literary, cultural, and intellectual history that engages the reader in all sorts of archaeological and genealogical work.

The original volume in Italian:

Italoamericana Vol II: Storia e Letteratura degli Italiani negli Stati Uniti 1880-1943