ABSTRACT
Michael DeCapite spent most of his life as a writer, reporting for newspapers, disseminating information for the United Nations, and expressing in fiction his own story and his ideas and feelings about America. In January, 1942 he became a press officer in the United Nations Information Office. In his published novels Michael DeCapite's view of America is that middle-class values corrupt, that real personhood lives and grows only in the working class, and that spiritual failure lurks in removing one's self from one's origins. DeCapite's concern with Americanization is shown in the physical moves Maria makes. His first novel Maria, published in 1943, is the story of Italian-Americans and their problems of assimilation and is "largely autobiographical", according to DeCapite's widow. DeCapite does not deal with the change from an ethnic identity to an American identity.
