FASCISM AND ITALIAN/AMERICAN WRITERS

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to begin the work of ana-lyzing Italian/American literary responses to Italian Fascism. To date, no such study has been done, and so this paper will outline the directions such a study might take and point out writers whose work, both during and after the rise and fall of Italian fascism, demonstrates a commitment to exposing and fighting the injustices of fascism.

The number of Italian/American writers during the period covering the rise and fall of Fascism, a twenty-year span from 1925-45, was few. And within this number, those creating poetry and fiction number even less, and of these, those promoting anti-fascist ideas were even fewer. This small number might be explained by the precarious position in which an anti-fascist Italian/American writer might have found him or herself.^[1] According to John P. Diggins, Italian/American anti-fascists numbered less than ten percent of the 4.6 million Italian Americans, and “could never successfully attack Mussolini without incurring the stigma of being “un-Italian” (116-17).^[2]

Trapped between two countries, one their parents’ homeland and the other their own, Italian/American writers tended to stay aloof of the international political situation of their time. It wouldn’t be until after the fall of Mussolini that Italian/Americans would, in any significant way, depict fascism in their fiction and poetry.

Another aspect that needs to be considered is the pro-fascist posture assumed by the leading figures the American literary scene of this period. Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, proponents of modernism were also, interestingly enough, if not outright pro-fascist, at least sympathetic to Mussolini’s fascism (Diggins 245). Those Italian/Americans who opposed Mussolini from the beginning did so at the risk of being attacked or labeled as communists by the larger American public as well as their own pro-Mussolini paesani.

One of the earliest Italian Americans to voice his opinion of Italian fascism in his poetry was Arturo Giovan-nitti. In his poem “To Mussolini” he accuses the Father of Italian Fascism of winning “fame with lies.” And he tells il Duce that “No man is great who does not find / A poet who will hail him as he is / With an almighty song that will unbind / Through his exploits eternal silences. / Duce, where is your bard? In all mankind / The only poem you inspired is this” (72). In “Italia Speaks,” Giovannitti depicts America as a child of Italy who can rescue its mother from “The twin ogres in black and brown [who] have polluted my gardens /” (76). Giovannitti composed poems that echo Walt Whitman’s patriotic odes during the Civil War. In his “Battle Hymn of the New Italy” we find a synthesis of Giosue Carducci and Whitman, as Giovan-nitti calls for the Italian people to rise up against Musso-lini and Hitler. Giovannitti, an experienced journalist and activist in the American labor movement, was one of the few sturdy presences in the anti-fascist literature of the times.

Along with Giovannitti, those most prominent anti-fascists whose writing appeared most frequently in prominent American publications were the fuorusciti, those Italian intellectuals who left Italy and found refuge, more often than not, in American universities: Gaetano Salvemini, Harvard; Max Ascoli, New School for Social Research; Giuseppe Borgese, University of Chicago; and Lionello Venturi, Johns Hopkins (Diggins 140).^[3] Their presence made “the universities one of the few anti-Fascist ramparts in America” (Diggins 261). While much has been written by and about these refugees, there exists little if anything which analyzes the contributions to the anti-fascist cause made by Italian/American writers who were born in the United States.

Unlike the few Italian immigrant writers who preceded them, whose work essentially were arguments for acceptance as human beings and pleas for recognition as Americans, the children of Italian immigrants used their writing to both document and escape the conditions under which they were born and raised.^[4] A common thread in the works of these writers is the difference in life between the generation of the parents and the child. Their parents’ generation, characterized by hard work and the acceptance of the injustices as destiny, would give way to the child’s ability to fight injustice through writing and political action.

A Generation Removed

The four American writers of Italian descent who were most prominent during this period were Pietro di Donato, John Fante, Jerre Mangione and Frances Winwar (Vinci-guerra). Of these, the most politically committed were Mangione and Winwar. di Donato, author of the 1939 national best-seller, Christ in Concrete, was conspicuously silent about fascism as was John Fante, an esta-blished literary figure by the 1940s. While di Donato’s writing was not specifically anti-fascist, his life’s work was very critical of established democratic authority. Fante, while referring to Mussolini and fascism in his letters to his mother and H. L. Mencken, the publisher of Fante’s early stories, never discusses the subject in his stories or novels.^[5] Fante’s attitude toward party-line politics and Marxist aesthetics represents a common apolitical attitude taken by Italian/American writers who for the most part were busy documenting the experiences of life in Little Italies and fighting more local injustices through the labor movement. As Fante wrote in a letter to H. L. Mencken:

I haven’t sucked out on Communism and I can’t find much in Fascism. As I near twenty-six, I find myself moving toward marriage and a return to Catholicism. Augustine and Thomas More knew the answers a long time ago. Aristotle would have spat in Mussolini’s face and sneered at Marx. The early fathers would have laughed themselves sick over the New Deal. . . . If I get ahold of enough money, I may leave the country. Give me a few books, some wine, a girl and a bit of good music. The sheep will be stamped out and die anyhow. All I want is that they leave me alone. (Fante/Mencken 103)

Unlike Fante and di Donato, Jerre Mangione wrote extensively about the effects of fascism on Italy and of those who fought fascism in Europe. In fact, nearly all his fiction and much of his literary criticism is devoted to anti-fascist themes. One of his earliest books reviews is of Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara. Entitled “Happy Days in Fascist Italy” the review appeared in the October 2, 1934 issue of the New Masses and represents Mangione’s earliest attempt to explain fascism to an American audience. “Fascism,” Mangione wrote, “contrary to the impression it tries to give to the world has made his [the peasant’s] lot considerably worse. It has borne down on him in many instances the naive faith the ignorant peasant had in ‘his government’ and depriving him of his means of livelihood” (37). Mangione uses this opportunity to present an alternative view of fascism, that of the illiterate Italian peasant who was “tricked” into accepting the veiled offer of hope and progress extended by Mussolini’s black-shirt movement:

Silone’s canvas takes in the whole of Fontamara, the money-mad, tyrannical officials; the politician who calls himself “friend of the people” and then betrays them at every turn; those peasants who, before they realized the true implications of Fascism and implicit faith in God and “their” government. . . . Fascism has wiped Fontamara off the map, but Silone has put it on again in such a way that no Fascist bullets can destroy its significance. (38)

During this early stage of his writing career, unlike di Donato and Fante, Mangione begins the task of interpreting Italian culture and life under Mussolini. His review of translations of Pirandello’s books: Better Think Twice About It and The Outcast, in the August 28, 1935 issue of the New Republic points out Pirandello’s influence on Fascist literature:

Long inclined to emphasize the cerebral and anti-realistic aspects of writing, Fascist literature needed only an impetus like Pirandello’s to give it direction; that he has succeeded in giving it, is shown by the sheerly psychological and fantastic themes used and abused by modern Italian writers in every branch of literature . . . it is hard to read very far in his two latest books without seeing Pirandello, the acrobatic metaphysician, jostling aside the characters and stealing the stage for his own pet somersaults.” (83)

During the same year, Mangione reviewed Mr. Aristotle, a translation of Ignazio Silone’s collection of short stories. The review was entitled “Pirandello Didn’t Know Him,” and comes from the fact that when Mangione interviewed Pirandello during the playwright’s visit to the United States, Pirandello said he had never heard of the author of Fontamara. This ignorance, Mangione wrote, “indicates that Italy has been more subtle than Germany in her suppression of intelligent books. Instead of making a bonfire of them, she has simply buried them, leaving no obituaries . . . [Silone] is an intellectual who can see clearly the plight and frustration of the peasant living under fascism” (23-24).^[6]

The predominance of Italy as a subject in Mangione’s writing can be attributed to his travels there during Mussolini’s regime. Mangione first visited Italy in 1936 and was an eye-witness to the methods of Fascist control. He first documented this trip in articles he published during 1937 and 1938 in the New Masses, the New Republic, Travel and Globe magazine and Broun’s Nutmeg and later it would become a significant portion of his first book, Mount Allegro (1943). His left-wing publications and his friendship with Tresca proved to haunt his first trip to Italy, during which his mail was censored and his movements monitored by Fascist authorities. In 1936 Mangione travelled through Italy and Sicily with the fear that at any time he could be arrested by Fascist authorities and forced into military service.^[7] This trip is recounted in his classic memoir Mount Allegro, first published in 1943. In it, he describes the effects of Fascism on Italy and Sicily as observed through contact with his encounters with Italians and his Sicilian relatives. He prefaces the section covering this trip with:

In my years of becoming an American I had come to understand the evil of Fascism and hate it with all my soul. One or two of my relatives argued with me on the subject because they had a great love for their native land and, like some men in love, they could see nothing wrong. Fascism was only a word to them; Mussolini a patriotic Italian putting his country on its feet. Why did I insist on finding fault with Fascism, they asked, when all the American newspapers were admitting Mussolini was a great man who made the trains run on time? (239-40)

In 1937, Mangione left a New York publishing job to work for the New Deal. In the course of this period of politicization he came to understand the terrible threat that European fascism presented to the world. As he worked to understand it better he befriended Carlo Tresca, an Italian anti-Fascist and anarchist who came to America in the early 1900s to aid the exploited Italian immigrant laborers. His interactions with Tresca became the material upon which he would build his second novel, Night Search (1965). Based on the assassination of Tresca, Night Search dramatizes the experience of Michael Mallory, the illegitimate son of anti-fascist labor organizer and newspaper publisher by the name of Paolo Polizzi, a character based on Carlo Tresca.^[8] Published in 1965, this novel follows Mallory as he searches for the murderer of his father. Mallory is an apolitical public relations writer inclined toward liberalism who through his investigation of his father’s death, learns to take action, and in doing so, comes to an understanding of where he stands in relation to contemporary politics. Mallory very much resembles Stiano Argento, the main protagonist in Mangione’s earlier and more strongly anti-fascist novel, The Ship and the Flame (1948). During this same period Mangione also read Sicilian writers, interviewed Luigi Pirandello, and convinced the publishing firm that employed him to accept the a translation of Ignazio Silone’s now classic anti-fascist novel, Bread and Wine.

The power of Mangione’s anti-fascist writing comes from his ability to depict the effects of fascism on the common people. The theoretical arguments of such writers as Salvemini and Borgese take on flesh and voice through Mangione’s anecdotal portrayals of relatives and ex-Americans. Nowhere is this more obvious than in two short stories that Mangione published in Globe magazine. In “Sicilian Policeman,” (May, 1937), Mangione profiles a distant cousin of his who is a policeman. The story depicts the abuse the Italian authorities take from civilians. In “A Man’s Best Audience in His Horse” (April-May, 1938) Mangione presents a strong anti-fascist perspective through Giovanni, a Neapolitan horse and buggy taxi-driver who is believed to be crazy because he criticizes the fascist government in conversations with his horse named Garibaldi. Giovanni won’t talk philosophy and politics to his wife, Assunta, because she considers Mussolini to be “a ‘good-looking genius’” (33). In these two stories, Mangione created parables which portray the anti-authoritarian nature of the common Italian people.

Mangione explored in greater depth the effects of fascism on his relatives in “Fontamara Revisited” through which he describes a visit to Realmonte, his ancestors’ homeland in southern Italy. In a later publication, based on his European experiences of the late 1930s, Mangione presents a more sophisticated overview of the effects of fascism in his novel The Ship and the Flame by creating an allegory for the sorry state of political affairs in Europe prior to America’s entry into the Second World War. The protagonist, Stiano Argento is one of a number of characters fleeing Fascist and Nazi powers. Argento, a professor of Italian History and Literature in Sicily, accused unjustly of anti-fascist activities, escapes the Fascist authorities with the help of local Sicilian people and is smuggled aboard the Portuguese ship Setubal. Aboard the ship is Austrian anti-nazi writer, Josef Renner and a number of refugees from other parts of Europe. The ship, run by a Fascist sympathizing Captain, is headed for Mexico. On the way from Lisbon, it is stopped by a Nazi submarine and three men are to be taken off, Renner, wanted by the Nazi’s for his earlier anti-nazi actions. In escape, Renner, a friend of Stiano since their college days, finds he is unable to further resist the Nazi’s and commits suicide. Among Renner’s papers is a draft of a novel based on Argento’s anti-fascist activities which Argento burns after reading.

Denied entry into Mexico, the Setubal heads for Nazi controlled Casablanca, where Stiano believes the Captain will turn over his passengers. Stiano, a liberal Catholic, realizes that the prayers his wife urges him to make won’t be enough; he must act to save the passengers from the Captain, a Mussolini-like figure who is determined to return his cargo to a place where many will face death or internment in concentration camps. Argento, inspired by Renner’s death and his writing, takes control of the situation and is able to douse the flame of Fascism that threatens to engulf the ship. Argento’s decision to act comes from the guilt he feels about having let the flame develop the power that virtually destroyed his Sicilian homeland. Through his actions and those of Renner’s Polish mistress, Tereza Lenska, the entire group, except for Peter Sadona,a Yugoslavian accused of being a revolutionary, are allowed to enter the United States.

Mangione, aware of the dilemma of the liberal and the fate of the revolutionary in the world, created a microcosm of the larger world of his time which, while suggesting that the struggle against fascism can be won through heroic action, reminds us that there still remains intolerance and persecution of those who think and especially act differently than those who enforce the order of other forms of government.

Another strong Italian/American public voice of anti-fascism was Frances Winwar. Winwar, who Anglicized her Italian name Vinciguerra at her publisher’s suggestion so that it would fit on the spine of her first book, is the only Italian/American writer besides di Donato to speak at an American Writers Congress. At the Second American Writers Congress in 1937, she gave a paper, entitled “Literature Under Fascism,” in which she described the effects of fascist repression on Italian literature of the 1930s and suggested that unless fascism is fought, similar consequences would face the writing of other countries. Winwar concludes her survey of contemporary Italian literature by announcing that “The dark Seicento has come again over intellectual Italy. Fortunately there are exiles. Wandering from land to land, from country to country, they and their works are the living proof that the best of Italy cannot be destroyed” (91). Winwar echoed these sentiments a few weeks later in her review of a translation of Alberto Moravia’s Wheel of Fortune in the New Republic in which she berates the novel and most of contemporary Italian literature not coming from fascist exiles for seeming to “have been written in a vacuum . . . in some Never Never Land . . . far removed from the Italy of dictatorships and Ethiopian conquests . . .” (165).

While Winwar unabashedly displayed her anti-fascist beliefs in her critical articles, she displaced these direct attacks by devoting her time to literary biographies: Poor Splendid Wings: the Rosettis and their Circle (1933) concerned Italian expatriate artists: The Romantic Rebels (1935) covered the revolutionary spirit found in the lives and works of Byron, Shelley and Keats, Englishmen in Italy. In Farewell the Banner: Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dorothy (1938), she creates, as in her other books, an allegory for the contemporary period. In essence, with these books, Winwar, keeps alive the notion of better times in Italy while reinforcing the idea that great writers can indeed affect history.^[9]

Like Frances Winwar, novelist and critic Hamilton Basso kept Italian history and politics out of his fiction; however, he did contribute to the cause of anti-fascism through a few of his articles. His most important and interesting contribution is “Italian Notebook: 1938,” published in the New Republic. In this article, Basso sketches the dark life that fascism has brought to the Italian people that he experienced through his trip to Italy.

There is more in Italy than this regime. But slowly, little by little, it sinks into your awareness. It is not only the soldiers and the uniforms and the little boys drilling. It is not only the banners and the inscriptions on the walls and the vast domed forehead of Il Duce. It is something you cannot touch and cannot hear and cannot see. It is some dark blight on the human spirit. It is a cold black shadow on the land. Slowly it sinks into you, little by little, and in the end you are cold all over. You ache for the American sun. (147)

Basso debunks any comparison of Mussolini to Caesar and sees Mussolini as “. . . an Italian Kingfish . . . a bigger and better version of Huey Long” (149).

In the early 1930s Luigi Fraina, who later changed his name to Lewis Corey, was one of the earliest to publish Marxist literary criticism in America.^[10] Fraina was born in Italy and came to America with his mother at the age of three to join his father, a republican exile. Fraina, an early participant in the DeLeon socialist labor movement, was involved in the founding of the American Communist Party, but by the age of 30 disconnected himself from any political group and became a leader of the anti-Communist liberal movement.^[11] During this period he was a union activist and a prolific Marxist critic and journalist. He remained amazingly silent during the period of Italian fascism; however, he did write a number of books about American capitalism in which he included chapters analyzing fascism and its effects on world capitalism.

In one of his few directly anti-fascist articles, “Human Values in Literature and Revolution,” Corey speaks out against fascism and argues that the only good literature is that which concerns “itself primarily with consciousness and values, with attitudes toward life” (8). Of the literature of his time that does this, Fraina notes three types: “The literature of capitalist disintegration,” “The literature of fundamental human values and defense of those values,” and “The literature of conscious revolutionary aspiration and struggle.” Fraina sees fascism as “the final proof” that “In any period of fundamental social change, particularly as the old order decays, there is an increasing degradation of human values” (8). Fraina points to the writing of Ignazio Silone as truly revolutionary:

In one of his short stories Silone (whose Fontamara combines the understanding of theory and the sweep of life into a magnificent symphony) tells of a group of radical workers who are destroyed by a fascist spy because of their sense of decency. The moral is: you cannot be decent against the indecent. But Silone conveys more: that it is terrible to abandon decency, even necessarily and temporarily, because our fight is to make life decent. (8)

Constantine Panunzio, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and author of The Soul of an Immigrant, one of the earliest book-length autobiographies by an Italian American, contributed to the understanding of the plight of Italian Americans in this period through his article “Italian Americans, Fascism and the War” published in 1942 in the Yale Review. Panunzio explained the relationship between Italian Americans and the government of the immigrants’ native land, arguing that while Italian Americans might have nibbled the bait of fascism “as mainly a diversion or a means of escape from the feeling of inferiority which the American community imposed on them” (782), they never swallowed the hook, and “Now that the test of war has come, there is no question as to where almost one hundred per cent of our Italian immigrant population stands” (782).

Anti-fascism becomes a major theme in the memoirs of American writers of Italian descent. As we have seen in the writing of Jerre Mangione, the fascist movement required public reaction by many Italian/American writers who identified both with their homeland and the homeland of their parents.

Angelo Pelligrini, in American Dream: An Immigrant’s Quest, one of his book of memoirs, includes a discussion of fascism in his recollections of life in America during the Depression and concludes after reading Fontamara that “America in the depth of the Great Depression was an earthly paradise compared with the man Fontamaras of southern Italy” (163). Pellegrini devotes considerable space to his discussion of Fontamara and sees it as “a prelude to the revolutionary literature of the thirties and an inspiration to the new generation of proletarian writers in America” (165). So moved by this novel was Pellegrini that he joined the Communist Party believing it was important enough a cause to place his “own security in jeopardy in behalf of the common welfare” (168). Pellegrini, who died early last year, saw his anti-fascist activities as the turning point in his life in which the immigrant became the American. He soon, like Fraina and di Donato became disenchanted with the Communist party dogma and left.

Recently Carlo Marzani, who wrote a novel entitled The Survivor and a number of studies of American Cold War policy and Eurocommunism, has begun writing his memoirs which reflect a social conscience formed by the anti-fascist activities of the 1930s. Marzani has spent his life fighting against injustice through his writing. At the age of ten, he published parodies of Fascist songs. In the past seventy years, he has written six books, dozens of pamphlets and film documentaries; he also assisted Salvemini with Salvemini’s Beneath the Axe of Fascism. In each case, his goal has been to make America a better place to live by keeping a vigilance over corporate capitalism’s fascist tendencies.

Now at the age of 80, the writer, whom Italo Calvino called “The only man truthfully and completely in love with the United States,” has shifted his focus to recount the story of his life. Roman Childhood, is the first in a series of five or six small books through which Marzani will recall the eight decades of his education as a reluctant radical. The second installment, Growing Up American, is due out this month, and he is currently at work on the third volume entitled Spain, Munich and Dying Empires.

Roman Childhood, which covers Marzani’s life from his 1912 birth through his immigration to America in 1924, documents the author’s movement from self- to other-consciousness. Marzani had used some of this material in “The Survivor,” his only novel, published in 1958. That was seven years after he was convicted of “defrauding” the government by concealing a reluctant, one-year membership in the Communist Party. In the novel, Marc Ferranti, a Marzani-like character, is acquitted—a verdict achieved through the help of a senator who reads Ferranti’s unpublished autobiography. It is this story within a story which depicts Marzani’s response to Fascism and his family’s flight away from Mussolini’s fascism and to American democracy. During a scene of a bitter coal miner’s strike, Giordano Aurelius, the fictitious name given to Ferranti’s father, explains the miners’ situation to his son:

A man doesn’t crawl, that what he means. Mussolini and Fascism are like all the companies and all the Sor Panunzios [a padrone] sitting on top of the Peppones [a strike leader]. By fraud and by force, and a man can’t speak, only to say yes sir and thank you sir. They trick and force the people into slavery, beat them into submission so that we bend our backs, walk on four legs, until we are sick with fear and sick with shame and rage. . . . (135)

It is this strong sense of what happened in Italy to his father, that leads Ferranti to stand strong against injustice, even if his actions are seen as un-American. This is a theme that replays itself consistently throughout the critical writings of Marzani. And nowhere does it come through as clearly as in his memoirs.

Roman Childhood opens with an “Appreciation” of Marzani by Italo Calvino, who met Marzani during a 1960 visit to the U.S. What follows is a depiction of his childhood; Marzani contrasts his life with that of his best friend who later on became a staunch fascist and then a corporate businessman. Both joined the Youth Catholic Explorers, a Boy Scout-like group and often found themselves battling the Balillas, a Fascist youth organization.

Marzani’s first-hand experience of Fascism enabled him to recognize it approaching the U.S. “The key to an understanding of fascism,” he writes, “is its destruction of existing democratic institutions.” Marzani saw the 1947 loyalty oaths for public servants, ordered by Harry Truman and the American Cold War policies, as the first steps towards Fascism in America.

Remembering his father’s wish that the Italians should have fought Fascism in Italy, Marzani dedicated his life to combatting it in America. As he told a prison psychologist, “I felt duty-bound to defend Roosevelt’s policies, which Truman was perverting. I did it reluctantly; I had no choice.”

He never dreamed of a life of political activism. A budding theater director, Marzani was planning for a career as a dramatist when, in 1939, he left Oxford University for Spain. There, he joined the Partisans in their battle against Fascism. “I knew then that if Spain fell the world would be drawn into another war” (Gardaphe 1992). Marzani’s subsequent books will deal with the author’s participation in the fight against fascism.

Conclusion

It isn’t until after the 1940s that anti-fascist ideas find their way into the fiction of Italian/American writers. As Felix Stefanile said in a recent interview, “We were busy working in unions and when the war broke out, a lot of us were busy fighting it through our muscle and not our words.” However, in spite of the absence of works published during the period of the rise and fall of Italian fascism, fascism looms large in the literary imagination of American writers of Italian descent. Its presence as a theme and a force which inspired stories, novels and poems, is something that demands further consideration and analysis. Two prime examples are Michael DeCapite’s No Bright Banner (1944) and Ben Morreale’s Monday, Tuesday, Never Come Sunday (1977). Such consideration is essential for the understanding of the role that Italian Fascism played in both Americanizing immigrants and Italianizing their children.

Works Cited

Ascoli, Max. “Fascism in the Making.” The Atlantic Monthly. 152.5 (November 1933): 580-85.

Attanasio, Salvatore. “My Father Has it All Figured Out.” American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose and Verse By Members of the Federal Writers’ Project. New York: Viking Press, 1937. 107-11.

Basso, Hamilton. “Italian Notebook.” New Republic 95.1228 (June 15, 1938): 147-49.

Borgese, G. A. Goliath: The March of Fascism. New York: The Viking Press, 1938.

Capraro, Bianco. “Art Under Mussolini.” New Masses 12.7 (August 14, 1934): 11-13.

Cooney, Seamus, ed. John Fante: Selected Letters 1932 to 1981. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1991.

DeCapite, Michael. No Bright Banner. New York: John Day, 1944.

Diggins, John P. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.

Fraina, Luigi. (Pseud. Lewis Corey). The Crisis of the Middle Class. New York: Covici-Friede, 1935.

___. The Decline of American Capitalism. New York: Covici-Friede, 1934.

___. The House of Morgan. New York: G. Howard Watt, 1930.

___. “Human Values in Literature and Revolution.” Story 8.46 (May, 1936): 4+.

Gardaphe, Fred L. “Swimming Against the Tide.” Fra Noi (June, 1992): 24.

Giovannitti, Arturo. The Collected Poems of Arturo Giovannitti. Intr. Norman Thomas. Chicago: E. Clemente and Sons, 1962. Rep. New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Hart, Henry. “As Benito Desires Me.” New Masses 16.6 (August 6, 1935): 28-29.

Mangione, Jerre. “Acrobat to Il Duce.” Rev. of Better Think Twice About It and The Outcast by Luigi Pirandello. New Republic 84.1082 (August 28, 1935): 82-83.

___. An Ethnic at Large. 1978. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983.

___. (Pseud. Mario Michele). “Fontamara Revisited.” New Republic 91.1173 (May 26, 1937): 69-71.

___. “A Man’s Best Audience is His Horse.” Globe 2.5 (April-May, 1938): 30+.

___. Mount Allegro. 1943. New York: Columbia UP, 1972.

___. Night Search. New York: Crown Publishers, 1965.

___. (Pseud. Jay Gerlando). “Pirandello Didn’t Know Him.” Rev. Mr. Aristotle by Ignazio Silone. New Masses 17.7 (November 12, 1935): 23-24.

___. The Ship and the Flame. New York: A. A. Wyn, 1948.

___. “Sicilian Policeman.” Globe 1.2 (May, 1937): 69-70.

Marzani, Carl. The Education of a Reluctant Radical: Roman Childhood, Book I. New York: Topical Books, 1992.

___. The Survivor. New York: Cameron Associates, 1958.

Morreale, Ben. Monday Tuesday . . . Never Come Sunday. Plattsburgh, NY: Tundra Books, 1977.

Padovani, Aldo. “Italy on the Brink.” New Masses 16.10 (September 3, 1935): 17-18.

Palmieri, Mario. The Philosophy of Fascism. Chicago: The Dante Alighieri Society, 1936.

Pannunzio, Constantine. “Italian Americans, Fascism, and the War.” Yale Review 31 (June 1942): 771-82.

Pellegrini, Angelo. American Dream. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986.

Salvemini, Gaetano. Italian Fascist Activities in the United States. Ed. and intr. Philip V. Cannistraro. New York: Center for Migration Studies, 1977.

Stefanile, Felix. “The Dance at St. Gabriels.” From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana. Eds. Anthony J. Tamburri, Paolo Giordano and Fred L. Gardaphe. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1992. 158.

Winwar, Frances. Rev. Wheel of Fortune by Alberto Moravia. New Republic 91.1176 (June 16, 1937): 165-66.

___. “Literature Under Fascism.” The Writer in a Changing World. Ed. Henry Hart. New York: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1937. 81-91.

^[1]See Mario Palimieri’s The Philosophy of Fascism for an interesting Italian/American pro-fascist perspective.

^[2]For an account of the effect that fascism had on an Italian/ American family see Salvatore Attanasio “My Father Has It All Figured Out.”

^[3]These fuorusciti were responsible for a number of influential anti-fascist publications. See G. A. Borgese’s Goliath: The March of Fascism; Gaetano Salvemini’s Italian Fascist Activities in the United States.

^[4]See Pascal D’Angelo’s Son of Italy, Constantine Pan-nunzio’s The Soul of an Immigrant and Marie Hall Ets’ Rosa.

^[5]See John Fante: Selected Letters 1932-1981. Reference to Mussolini and Fascism can be found in the following letters: to his mother, January 31, 1935 (44) and October 12, 1935, (107) and to Pascal Covici, May 26, 1940 (166) and June 14, 1940 (168).

^[6]An interesting interview with Pirandello, entitled “As Benito Desires Me,” was published by Henry Hart in New Masses.

^[7]Recounted in much more detail, this trip became part of An Ethnic at Large: A Memoir of American in the Thirties and Forties, first published in 1978. In a chapter, “Afraid in Fascist Italy” Mangione recalls the fear he had that he, like other Italian/American young men who had travelled to Italy, might be forced into the Italian military “as a reprisal for his [father’s] having escaped army service by migrating to the States (179).

^[8]According to Mangione, Tresca was murdered while on his way to a book party celebrating the publication of Mangione’s Mount Allegro.

^[9]For a more detailed look at what effect Fascism had on Italian art see Bianco Capraro’s “Art Under Mussolini.”

^[10]In David Madden’s Proletarian Writers of the Thirties, (1968) attention is given to Louis Fraina, also known as Lewis Corey. But Fraina, while producing some of the earliest Marxist cultural criticism in this country, concentrated his efforts on social, economic and political analysis and did not write fiction.

^[11]See Fraina’s obituary, “Lewis Corey, 1894-1953.” Antioch Review. 13.4 (December, 1953): 538-45. See also Paul M. Buhle’s book on Fraina forthcoming from Humanities Press.