A few years ago, a friend submitted a novel about working-class
Italian-Americans to a New York publisher and found an Italian-
American editor there who loved it.
But alas, the novel, though very good, was never published. Not
"enough blood and guts," a more senior editor said.
After no other house accepted the book, my friend broke it into
stories and published them in literary magazines.
I tell this story because it relates to a major problem facing
Italian-American writers. Editors, influenced by Hollywood, popular
taste, or their own bias, expect goons in action in Italian-
American stories. The writer with a thoughtful, literary turn of
mind is unlikely to find a sympathetic audience among them.
Early modernist writers, from Henry James and E.M. Forster
through Arthur Miller, portray Italians and Italian-Americans as
violent, primitive, and, if educated, devious. For these writers
Italians and Italian-Americans represent animal vitality, but they
are clearly shown as brutal, morally stunted, or pathetic remnants
of a fallen civilization.
In the end, Edward Gibbon's 18th-century classic "Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire," which reveals great love for empire but
disdain for the multicultured Italy of its day, may be a more
fundamental part of American bias against Italians and Italian-
Americans than "Scarface," "The Godfather," or "The Sopranos." Call
this the trickle-down effect of social prejudice in literature and
entertainment.
In TV shows, advertisements, children's cartoons, and even some
university programs emphasizing cultural diversity, that bias
persists despite the Italian-American intellectual foundation on the
grandeur of Dante, the stateliness of Virgil, the experimentation of
Pirandello, and the metaphysical complexity of Petrarch and the
Troubadours.
Italian-Americans are consistently portrayed as either loud or
stupidly laconic. Yet their life has evolved from a thoughtful,
realistic literary tradition whose strength (Boccaccio, Primo Levi,
and Italo Calvino) derives from humor and intellectual analysis.
Italian-American writers have continued that powerful tradition,
at times with Italian-American subjects, at others with purely
American themes, as with Don Delillo and Richard Russo, whose novel
"Empire Falls," evoking Gibbon but not Italy, won this year's
Pulitzer Prize in literature, the first for an Italian-American. …
