Whatever I have learned about Italian American literature was on my own; no teacher suggested I read what I have read, and what I have learned has saved my life in many ways. In Mario Puzo’s novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), I found my widowed mother, who raised four children by herself, to be very much like the protagonist, Lucia Santa, who “makes the family organism stand strong against the blows of time: the growth of children, the death of parents, and all changes of worldly circumstance. She lives through five years in an instant, and behind her trail the great shadowy memories that are life’s real substance and the spirit’s strength.”

In Pietro di Donato’s masterpiece, Christ in concrete (1939), I heard my hod-carrier grandfather through Geremio’s dreaming aloud while he worked on a construction site: “Laugh, laugh all of you...but I tell you that all my kids must be boys so that they someday will be big American builders. And then I’ll help them to put the gold away in the basements.... But am I not a man, to feed my own with these hands? Ah, but day will end and no boss in the world can then rob me the joy of my home!”