No one represents the Italian American journey from undesirable outsiders to embraced citizens better than Frank Sinatra. From impoverished beginnings in an immigrant, single-parent household to world renown as "Chairman of the Board," he beat the odds to become one of the most influential and best-loved artists of the twentieth century. Sinatra's symbolic role to the millions of Italian American immigrants who looked up to him as proof of the American dream was far-reaching.

The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini famously remarked that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not "words:" the men and women who made lives in America did so mostly in silence, their stories told in private. But stories there were, and with this revelatory book, these stories are no longer hidden.In this innovative portrait of the Italian-American experience, Ilaria Serraoffers the first comprehensive study of the largely ignored legacy of immigrant autobiographies, bringing to light fifty-eight fascinating works written from the late 19th to the mid-twentieth century.

efore The Godfather and The Last Don, there was Puzo's classic story about the loves, crimes and struggles confronted by one family of New York City immigrants living in Hell's Kitchen. Fresh from the farms in Italy, Lucia Santa struggles to hold her family together in a strange land. At turns poignant, comic and violent, and with a new preface by the author, The Fortunate Pilgrim is Italian-American fiction at its very best.From the Hardcover edition.

One of the 20th century's greatest works of social protest-and its 21st-century message. A classic examination of the American experience for hard-working Italian immigrants living in New York City's Lower East Side shortly before the Great Depression, Christ in Concrete focuses on a family's struggle against harsh economic realities and tenement living.

View the Table of Contents.Read the Introduction.

Winner of a 2006 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation

"Ferraro maintains a breezy, journalistic style that has produced an easy and entertaining read. His work may give hope to people of other ethnicities who presently suffer from isolation and alienation on the part of the general American public." —Multicultural Review

One of the first novels to explore Italian American women's experience and an acknowledged contemporary classic of Italian American literature, Umbertina tells the richly detailed story of four generations of women. The novel follows Umbertina and her descendants from her roots in a Calabrian village through a period of American assimilation, to Umbertina's great-granddaughters' efforts to resolve the dilemma of their Italian American identity. When first published in 1979, the Philadelphia Inquirer called it "an important novel for these times. . . .

Using semiotics as a theoretical foundation, this book reexamines the notion of the hyphenate writer. It argues for an analogous set of categories no longer chronologically or generationally based, but cognitively based, so that the traditionally considered "first-stage" or first generation hyphenate writer now figures as an "expressive" writer who is not necessarily part of the immigrant or first American-born generations.