An Annotated Bibliography of Italian American Studies

Fiction

Page 22:  from Tucci Waldo

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Tucci, Nicolo. Before My Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962.
[A novel-memoir set in Europe imaginatively depicting the author’s family.]
 
---. The Rain Came Last and Other Stories. New York: New Directions Books, 1990.
[Introduced by Mary McCarthy, this collected was published as a revived modern classic and includes the best of Tucci’s stories.]
 
Tusiani, Joseph. Envoy from Heaven. New York: I. Obolensky, 1965.
[Dante and Mother Cabrini interact in this portrayal of the plight of Italian immigrants to America.]
 
Valerio, Anthony. The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn. New York: H. B. Davis, 1982.
[A dramatic lyric history of Brooklyn’s Italians sung as an opera by a single narrator.]
 
---. Valentino and the Great Italians, According to Anthony Valerio. Toronto: Guernica Editions, 1994.
[By exploring both the Italians who have achieved greatness and those whose lives might have remained unknown had he not chosen them as subjects, Valerio speaks of and for the earlier generations of Italian Americans who consumed popular culture while it consumed them.]
 
Vannucci, Lynn. Coyote. New York: Bantam, 1987.
[The story of a young college woman’s exploits which include a love affair with a professor.]
 
Vassi, Marco. The Stoned Apocalypse. New York: Trident Press, 1972.
[A wild romp through the 60s with Vassi, a slum kid on the rise, as he adapts to a variety of cults in his trip through America.]
 
Ventura, Luigi Donato. Peppino. New York: William R. Jenkins, Co., 1885.
[Perhaps the first fictionalized account of the brutality faced and the vitality which sustained one of the early immigrants.]
 
Ventura, Luigi Donato with S. E. Shevitch. Misfits and Remnants. Boston: Ticknor and Company, 1886.
[Most likely the first collection of Italian-American fiction. Includes "Peppino" among its Italian-American and other non-ethnic stories.]
 
Villa, Silvio. Claudio Graziani, an Episode of War. New York: Brentano’s, 1919.
[A fictionalized account of an Italian soldier’s experience in World War I which includes the infamous retreat from Caporetto used by Hemingway in his Farewell to Arms.]
 
Vitiello, Justin. Confessions of a Joe Rock. Franklin Lakes, NJ: Lincoln Springs, 1992.
[Vitiello's response to Daniel DeFoe's Moll Flanders is set up as a manuscript received by a professor from a New Jersey student. The hilarious tale of a half Italian/ half Puerto Rican/American street kid who heads west in search of an education, carrying with him the story of Joe Rock.]
 
Vivante, Arturo. A Goodly Babe. Boston: Little, Brown, 1966.
[An Italian doctor with a practice near the American embassy in Rome falls in love with an American woman an eventually immigrates to America.]
 
---. The French Girls of Killini. Boston: Little, Brown, 1967.
[A first collection of Vivante’s stories, a series of cameos, which have appeared in the New Yorker and other magazines prior to 1966.]
 
---. Run to the Waterfall. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979.
[The stories center on the Sinese family: a father, mother and son.]
 
---. The Tales of Arturo Vivante. Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1990.
[A collection of the best of Vivante’s short stories.]
 
Wachtel, Chuck. Joe the Engineer. New York: William Morrow, 1983.
[The story of Joe Lazaro, a Vietnam War veteran who has returned home ready to enter the traditional American working class life. When he realizes that there must be more to his life than his job as a water meter reader and his marriage to a neighborhood girl, he begins to doubt the whole foundation of his life.]
 
---. The Gates: New York: Viking, 1995.
[Primo Thomas, is born to an African/American doctor and his Italian-American wife--a characterization that’s unique. While Wachtel does not spend much time on giving us the details of Primo’s mixed ancestry, he reminds us that while there are many ways in which these two cultures are different, there are many more in which they’re similar.]
 
Waldo, Octavia. A Cup of the Sun. New York: Harcourt, 1961.
[Depicts the tension between the immigrant parent who desperately holds on to the past and the Americanized daughter who resists patriarchal authority.]

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