ABSTRACT
In his last novel Night Search Jerre Mangione seems to have symbolically killed his Italian-ness and fully accepted his Americanness. At the age of ten or eleven, Mangione began his writing career by ghost-writing love letters for an uncle at ten or twenty five cents a letter. He describes writing these letters in his first book Mount Allegro and apparently supplied the story to biographers, because it appears in several notices from a 1943 Time magazine blurb to a 1965 "Books and Authors" column. The chapters between one and twelve in Mount Allegro concern Gerlando's home life and social events among his extended family and Sicilian neighbors. Gerlando had had after school and summer jobs, which had given him glimpses of America outside his ethnic milieu. Reunion in Sicily, Mangione's third book, is similar to Mount Allegro in format and style, but the narration of Mangione's second visit to Sicily is not fictionized.
