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The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies

Online ISBN:
9780823235032
Print ISBN:
9780823226788
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies

Ilaria Serra
Ilaria Serra
Department of Language and Linguistics, Florida Atlantic University
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Published:
30 April 2007
Online ISBN:
9780823235032
Print ISBN:
9780823226788
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not “words”, making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold. In this innovative portrait of the Italian–American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. The book offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy—the autobiographies written by immigrants. It looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration. Scouring archives, discovering diaries and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, the book recovers the voices of the first generation—bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, and seamstresses—compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often heavily accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities of work, survival, identity, and change. Moving between history and literature, the book presents each as the imaginative record of a self in the making and the collective story of the journey to selfhood that is the heart of the immigrant experience.

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