ABSTRACT
Italian Americans entered the literary realm of drama earlier and with far more ease than they did the area of fiction. Drama, along with opera and film, has thus proved to be the most natural form of expression for the still aptly described “sanguine” temperament and the strongly held code of behavior of most Italian Americans. People in the latter half of the twentieth century crave the very things they discarded in their lemming-like quest for the American Dream, and Italians for the most part have maintained many of them. The pit-bull tenacity necessary to accomplish such a feat is a double-edged sword often leading to a characteristic parochialism. Romanized Greek drama was introduced in 240 B.c. by Livius Andronicus, an actor turned playwright, who was also responsible for an innovation that developed into a new form of entertainment called pantomime.
