Guides: Italian American Studies @ Pitt: Literature

Poetry

Pieces of a Song by Diane di Prima
Feminist Beat poet Diane di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York. She attended Swarthmore College for two years before moving to Greenwich Village in Manhattan and becoming a writer in the emerging Beat movement. There, she developed friendships with poets Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, and Audre Lorde. After joining Timothy Leary's intentional community in upstate New York, she moved to San Francisco in 1968. One of her collections of poetry,The Poetry Deal, is also published by City Lights Publishers. Di Prima was named Poet Laureate of San Francisco in 2009. She has been awarded the National Poetry Association's Lifetime Service Award and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement and has also received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Committee on Poetry, the Lapis Foundation, and the Institute for Aesthetic Development. St. Lawrence University granted her an honorary doctorate.
99 Poems by Dana Gioia
A major career retrospective by the California Poet Laureate, Dana Gioia. 99 Poems: New & Selected gathers for the first time work from across his career, including many remarkable new poems. Gioia has not arranged this selection chronologically but instead has organized it by theme in seven sections: Mystery, Place, Remembrance, Imagination, Stories, Songs, and Love. The result is a book that reveals and renews the pleasures, consolations, and sense of wonder that poetry bestows.
Looking for Cover by Maria Fama
A graduate of Temple University, Maria Fama is the author of four other books and has been published in numerous literary journals and anthologies. Maria Fama is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Aniello Lauri Award for Creative Writing (2002 and 2005), the 1994 Dream Images Poetry Award, and the Amy Tritsch Needle Award for Poetry, in 2006.

Home Is a Foreign Country by Rina Ferrarelli

Rina Ferrarelli came from Italy at the age of fifteen. She taught English and translation studies at the University of Pittsburgh for many years. She has published a book and a chapbook of original poetry, Home Is a Foreign Country (1996), and Dreamsearch (1992); and three books of translation, Light Without Motion (1989), I Saw the Muses (Guernica, 1997), and Winter Fragments: Selected Poems of Bartolo Cattafi, (2006). The Bread We Ate, another book of poems, was published by Guernica in Spring 2012. (https://www.guernicaeditions.com/author/325

The Italian Collection by Sandra M. Gilbert
Sandra M. Gilbert, Distinguished Professor of of English Emerita at the University of California, Davis, is the author of eight collections of poetry: In the Fourth World (Alabama), The Summer Kitchen (the Heyeck Press), Emily’s Bread, Blood Pressure, Ghost Volcano and Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999 (the last four all from W. W. Norton), The Italian Collection (Depot Books), and Belongings (Norton). Her most recent volume of poems, Aftermath, was also published by Norton, in 2011. (sandramgilbert.com)
Paterson Light and Shadow by Maria Mazziotti Gillan; Mark Hillringhouse (Photographer)
This collection contains over thirty poems and thirty photographs that together explore the hallowed precincts of this once great industrial city, envisioned by Alexander Hamilton as the birthplace of manufacturing in a new nation, a city now home to countless immigrants who still struggle to work and to build lives and survive.

Birds of Sicily by Michelle Reale

An outstandingly powerful poetry collection which has personal resonance for me due to our shared Sicilian background. In these wonderfully written poems, Michelle explores themes of migration and finding one's place in a new, unfamiliar world and culture. Not much literature is written on the Italian-American experience and Reale's work is a most welcome contribution to that end. This is a work you will come back to again and again. -Julian Gallo, Author of Breathe

Fiction

Ask the Dust by John Fante
Ask the Dust is a virtuoso performance by an influential master of the twentieth-century American novel. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a young writer in 1930s Los Angeles who falls hard for the elusive, mocking, unstable Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress. Struggling to survive, he perseveres until, at last, his first novel is published. But the bright light of success is extinguished when Camilla has a nervous breakdown and disappears . . . and Bandini forever rejects the writer's life he fought so hard to attain.
Christ in Concrete by Pietro Di Donato
An uncompromising yet beautiful portrait of the life of Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1920s, Christ in Concrete is the story of a twelve-year-old boy who must support his family after his father's untimely death.
Umbertina by Helena Barolini
This multigenerational novel begins in Calabria, as Umbertina persuades her husband to emigrate. Through years of struggle on New York City's Lower East Side and in a growing upstate New York town, it is Umbertina's determination, ingenuity, and business sense that propel the family into financial success and security--leaving her daughters and granddaughters to sort out their identities as Italian Americans and as women.
Mount Allegro by Jerre Mangione; Herbert J. Gans (Preface by)
Depicts the lives of Sicilian immigrants in Rochester, New York, in the first half of the twentieth century as their customs blend and clash with those of their adopted country.
The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo
Follows one family of Italian immigrants who settle in New York in the late 1920s through World War II, a family dominated by a defiant matriarch who struggles to raise six children and preserve Old World values in a new land.
Paper Fish by Tina De Rosa
"In this magical and moving first novel, Tina De Rosa draws her reader deep into the world of an Italian-American family and community. Set on the West Side of Chicago during the 1940s and 1950s, Paper Fish is populated not by wiseguys or madonnas, but by hard-working immigrants whose heroism lies in their quiet, sometimes tragic humanity." "At the center of the novel is young Carmolina, who is torn between the bonds of the past and the pull of the future - a need for family and a yearning for independence. As Carmolina's story unfolds, it comes to contain many other narratives: memories and legends from the old country, passed on by her wise and loving grandmother Doria; the courtship tale of her father, an Italian-American policeman with a gentle heart and an artist's soul, and her mother, a lonely Lithuanian-American waitress; and the painful story of Dorina, her beautiful but silent sister."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Storming Heaven by Denise Giardina
Annadel, West Virginia, was a small town rich in coal, farms, and close-knit families, all destroyed when the coal company came in. It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy -- land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women. Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C.J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely, Sicilian immigrant Rose Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines. They all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic Battle of Blair Mountain -- when the United States Army greeted 10,000 unemployed pro-union miners with airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. It was the first crucial battle of a war that has yet to be won.

Memoir

An Ethnic at Large by Jerre Mangione
In this autobiography, Mangione (emeritus, English, U. of Pennsylvania) describes his experiences of growing up Sicilian in Rochester, his post-college years living in New York City and Greenwich Village, coming into adulthood in the 1930s and 1940s, coming to terms with his ethnicity, the struggles of becoming a writer, and his invitation to the White House in 1944 as a guest of Eleanor Roosevelt. (booknews.com)
Unto the Sons by Gay Talese
"An Italian ROOTS." The Washington Post Book World At long last, Gay Talese, one of America's greatest living authors, employs his prodigious storytelling gifts to tell the saga of his own family's emigration to America from Italy in the years preceding World War II. Ultimately it is the story of all immigrant families and the hope and sacrifice that took them from the familiarity of the old world into the mysteries and challenges of the new. From the Paperback edition.
Vertigo by Louise A. DeSalvo
In her no-holds-barred family memoir, controversial scholar-critic Louise DeSalvo breaks the traditional silence around life for an Italian American girl coming of age in working-class Hoboken, New Jersey. Upon first publication, DeSalvo's memoir'which sifts through painful memories of childhood incest, a sister's suicide, a mother's psychotic depression, and a father's violent rage'enjoyed wide acclaim as an instant classic of the genre, written in "one of the most refreshing feminist voices around."-"San Francisco Chronicle" Marketing Plans: East Coast readings Extensively promoted with new anthology "Taste This: Italian American Women Writers on Food and Identity" Louise DeSalvo is professor of English at Hunter College. She has published thirteen books, including the acclaimed "Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work,"
Beyond the Godfather by A. Kenneth Ciongoli (Editor); Jay Parini (Editor)
Call Number: PR55 D47A3 1996
Twenty-three Italian American writers explore the deeper cultural heritage of Italians beneath the stereotypes and the way their ethnicity has influenced their writing; analyze Italian American literature; and recount the political battles of Italian Americans. UP.
Framing A Life A Family Memoir by Geraldine A. Ferraro; Catherine Whitney
The heartwarming personal story of four generations of Italian-American women by former Congresswoman Geraldine A. Ferraro, the first female to be nominated for Vice President of the United States on a major party ticket.
Recollections of My Life As a Woman by Diane Di Prima
Call Number: PS3507.I68 Z475 2001
""My earliest sense of what it means to be a woman was learned from my grandmother, Antoinette Mallozzi, and at her knee.... She smelled of lemons and olive oil, garlic and waxes and mysterious herbs. I loved to touch her skin."" "So begins Diane di Prima's memoir, in which she explores the first three decades of her life and how she came to define herself as a woman. She grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and '40s in an Italian American family, and only by heroic effort was she able to break away and follow through on a lifelong commitment to become a poet, first made when she was in high school."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
L Is for Lion by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
A 1960s Bronx tomboy learns how to survive her brutal but humorous Italian family and all the rest that life throws her. The harder you hit the pavement, the higher you fly.

University of Pittsburgh Library System

Course & Subject Guides

Italian American Studies @ Pitt

Poetry

Fiction

Memoir