ABSTRACT
A number of responses appeared in Italian Americana’s Fall 1993 and Spring 1994 issues. The question Talese so appropriately raised and so poorly answered is one that had led a number of American literary critics and scholars of Italian descent in search of the place of the novel in Italian American culture and the place of the Italian American novelist in American culture. The novel is divided into five parts: “Geremio,”“Job,”“Tenement” “Fiesta,” and “Annunziata,” each focusing on the key figures in the myth. John Fante was born in Denver, Colorado, on April 8, 1909, to a father who immigrated from Abruzzi, Italy, and a mother born in Chicago to immigrant parents from Potenza, Italy. Fante’s works provide people with an insight into the process by which an American-born child of Italian immigrants fashions an American identity through the process of denying other immigrants and their children the same possibilities.
