followed immediately; and the Modern Library canonized the trilogy only three years after the publication of the third volume. Of the work that followed, a second trilogy and some of the short stories, focusing on Farrell's alter ego Danny O'Neill, are occasionally read by scholars for their insight both into the adolescent preoccupations fueling Farrell's writing and into the origins of those preoccupations in the Irish American community itself.
In 1929, while a student at the University of Chicago, Farrell wrote a short story, 'Studs,' in which a South Side Chicago street gang gathers at the wake of their buddy, the title character, who has died of double pneumonia at the age of twenty-five. Two of Farrell's teachers, James Weber Linn and Robert Morss Lovett, waxed enthusiastic and urged him to expand the narrative, concentrating on Studs's 'social milieu.' The resulting trilogy opened with Studs graduating from grammar school at age fifteen in 1916 and closed with his death (later than the original story) at age twenty-nine in 1931. Not quite progressivist in the manner Professors Linn and Lovett probably expected, the novel told how an intelligent and decent boy, born to industrious petit-bourgeois parents, talked himself out of high school into the poolhalls and onto the street corners — where he participated in interethnic gang warfare, alcohol abuse, and a gang rape for which he is nearly imprisoned.
Farrell found his account of Studs's typicality in the immaturity of -396- men who sought womenfolk to save them from themselves, and in the immaturity of women who wished to see their men (even Studs!) only as priests; in a Northern European Catholic Church marked less by the transubstantiation of the flesh than by a repressive Victorianism (a sex-denial that may have been of some use in the food-scarce Irish countryside but that was grotesquely inadequate to desire and its opportunities in the modern polyethnic city); and in an ethos of male Irish camaraderie that, for all its occasional attractiveness, was melancholic to the point of individual paralysis and bigoted to the point of communal immolation. However stereotypical the characterizations, Farrell revealed the social forces that produced them, attributing the unhappily familiar to neither an Irish legacy nor consumer capitalism per se but to a disastrous evolutionary intercourse between them. Although the first volume of the trilogy is most often taught and analyzed and the third volume probably comes in second, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan is the most acute and speaks to issues not just of the Irish in the early twentieth century. In this second volume, Farrell focused on the formation of violent urban gangs out of lower-class youth, whose energy of self-determination is admirable but whose strategies are self-defeating; presciently, the novel concludes in a replay of a crucial earlier scene, replacing its Irish American protagonists with incidental characters whose names sound Southern and whose skins are black.
Mary Doyle Curran was the first strong voice of Irish American women. The youngest child of an Irish-born woolsorter and his American-born wife, she worked her way through the Massachusetts State College and then took a Master's degree at the State University of Iowa, where she studied with Norman Foerster, René Wellek, and Austin Warren. Her one book, The Parish and the Hill (1949), is a memoir of familial vignettes, elegiac, loosely structured, and narrated by an authorial surrogate, young Mary O'Connor. It covers the settlement, long struggle, and qualified successes of O'Connor's kinfolk, who migrated in fits and starts from County Kerry, Ireland, to an unspecified central New England mill town. The Parish and the Hill tells a representative tale of intergenerational mobility — slow, painful, costly, but ultimately fruitful — and thus serves as an important historical corrective to Farrell's far more familiar portrayal of a bigcity Irish American underclass. Crucial to Curran's account are the -397- O'Connor women, who envision gaining security and comfort without assimilating to the 'lace curtain' materialism and individualism of the 'Hill' and who take the lead in bringing that vision to reality (while several O'Connor men fall prey to alcohol, violence, crime, or suicide). Little noticed in its own time, The Parish and the Hill did help to win its author positions at Queens College, where she founded an Irish Studies program, and at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
One of the better kept literary secrets of this century is the literature of Italians and their descendants in America. From the late teens through the early thirties, novels treating the immigrant colonies and Italian memory, twenty or so in number, were published by Bernardino Ciambelli (in Italian), Silvio Villa, Giuseppe Cautela, Garibaldi Marto Lapolla, John Antonio Moroso, Louis Forgione, and Frances Winwar (Francesca Vinciguerra, the first Italian American woman novelist). These novels by writers most of whom were educated in Italy did not stir the imagination of the American reading public (many were published by small presses) and provide little of nonhistorical interest to us today — with the exception perhaps of Forgione's Men of Silence (1928), a forerunner of both the mafia novel and hard-boiled detective fiction (predating Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest by two years). Of greater import in the earlier decades were several immigrant autobiographies by men of humble background who rose to some prominence after migrating: Antonio A. Arrighi's The Story of Antonio, the Galley Slave (1911), Constantine Panunzio's The Soul of an Immigrant (1920), and Pascal D'Angelo's Son of Italy (1914). Yet, for all the contributions to the archive before the mid-1930s, it was not until the maturation of the children of immigrants that Italian Americans produced a risorgimento of fiction about immigration. Around 1940, as if on cue, there arose a coterie of second-generation writers: John Fante, Pietro DiDonato, Jo Pagano, Guido D'Agostino, Jerre Mangione, Michael DeCapite, George Panetta, and Mari Tomasi. They produced two dozen novels and collections of shorter fiction, a majority of them works of considerable historical insight and emotional force.
Fante's Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1937) depicts adultery among Abruzzi immigrants in Boulder, Colorado, when a despondent stonemason compounds the humiliation of poverty with the shame of -398- transgressing family and faith. The title character of DeCapite's Maria (1940) is a Cleveland-born woman who accepts a marriage arranged by her immigrant parents and suffers the consequences with an inarticulate sensitivity that comes, by novel's end, to speak for itself. Mari Tomasi, the first significant Italian American woman novelist, published in 1940 a novel looking back to her ancestral town in the Piedmont Hills, then wrote a second treating her own childhood. A local color tapestry of Piedmontese granite workers and their families in Vermont, Like Lesser Gods (1949) examines the interaction of three forces: the impassioned artistry of the men, the marketdriven callousness of the business in which they are employed, and the quest for security and a sense of cultural belonging by the women they love. Of these minor classics, only Bandini has ever been reprinted (by the arts press Black Sparrow), and it is better known in Europe than in North America (as is often the case with United States immigrant literature). In contrast, two of the writers from this period — Pietro DiDonato and Jerre Mangione — won national attention right from the start and retained some measure of salience as spokesmen for Italo-America.
In 1937, DiDonato, the son of an Italian bricklayer and one himself for fourteen years, published a short story in Esquire telling of an Italian bricklayer who is buried alive on Good Friday when a wall he is building collapses. Proclaimed the Best Story of 1938 by Edward J. O'Brien, Christ in Concrete was greeted with a level of enthusiasm unrivaled for the short form. In the image of brick and mortar crushing the life out of a man who knows what is happening to him (and thus to his loved ones), the story tallied the horrendous toll enacted on those who had little choice but to earn their wages with their backs; in illuminating the fact of unnecessary suffering it lays blame not on capitalism but on shameless profiteering and on corruption within the political and legal systems. What made the story most effective, however, was the rendering of the consciousness of its protagonist, Geremio. In a way unprecedented, at least for Italian Americans, DiDonato made manifest how intelligent and sensitive was this man, whatever his lack of literacy and formal education. 'Christ in Concrete' also challenged popular Marxist romanticisms of the centrality of the workplace. Although the business of laying brick and pouring concrete left an impression on Geremio, especially - 399- on his tactility, the work did not determine his being: Geremio's soul was of a piece with humanity in general (as his faith dictated), and his particular sensibility — a consciousness rendered in Joycean Italianate English — was interwoven from Latin Marianist Catholicism, the peasant earthiness of the Italian South, and the pleasures and burdens of the large extended family.
At a time when proletarian fiction seemed by its formulas to have worn out its welcome, the public clamored that DiDonato give them more, and what emerged two years later was a novel, as it were, by popular demand. DiDonato let the original story serve as a first chapter, then focused on Geremio's son Paul, who must fill his father's shoes though only twelve years of age. Although distended in places, Christ in Concrete (1939) expands upon what made the story successful: its rendering of the impact of the job upon those immersed in peasant Italian culture. DiDonato was praised for rendering real Italians rather than, as Louis Adamic put it, working-class 'puppets' manufactured according to 'intellectuals' notions of synthetic Marxians.' On the one hand, we see Paul's uncle lose his leg in another accident, the court back the construction company in welching on Geremio's death benefits, and Paul be underpaid, forced into kickbacks, and refused a rightful bonus.
