The Columbia History of the American Novel

(1961) on Russian Jewish women, Mary Gordon's several novels on the Irish Catholics, and Mario Puzo's The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), which is the consumshy; mate narrative of the postwar period and possibly the most powerful immigrant novel of them all.

Focused on a fictional version of Puzo's mother, The Fortunate Pilgrim narrates the struggles of Lucia Santa, an illiterate peasant woman from the south of Italy burdened with six children in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan. As an heir to la miseria, Lucia Santa cannot understand her children's clamoring for something they call 'happishy; ness' when the family's centuries-long search for 'bread and shelter' has not yet been achieved. Mesmerized by Hollywood films and lishy; brary books, the children do not understand that their Americanshy; wrought dreams — of romantic love and intimate friendship, of work that is ethical and engaging, and of life lived in general according to dictates of the imagination — may threaten the very process of obshy; taining the wherewithal to begin to countenance such dreams. As a young man coming of age, Gino, the eldest of the three younger children and Puzo's alter ego, has the greatest case of wanderlust and -404- the largest insensitivity to the reasoning of his mother: he comes to hate Lucia Santa for consigning his father to the asylum, for approvshy; ing his sister's abandonment of school and his brother's transformashy; tion into a petty gangster, and for driving yet another brother (harshy; nessed to a railroad clerk's desk) to suicide. The novel ends in separate, bitter victories: Lucia Santa and the rest of the family move to the Long Island suburbs while Gino enlists in the army vowing never to return home.

In composing The Fortunate Pilgrim, Puzo made manifest in 1964 what Gino could not have seen twenty years earlier. He credited his magnificent protagonist, Lucia Santa, with the vision and courage to conquer poverty, with indirectly legitimating the pursuit by her younger children of dreams not her own, and with comprehending in almost insupportable pain the 'crimes' she has committed against her family along the way. What made The Fortunate Pilgrim a repshy; resentative postwar narrative was this hidden agenda — to enact in writing a reconciliation between the generations that was not possible in fact. Its cutting edge came not from the politics of ethnic represhy; sentation, as mediated by a marketplace skeptical of Southern Italian otherness, but from the repercussions of intergenerational cultural transformation, in which an ethnic son felt the need to wage battle against his own suspicions of the past. Although noted as a 'small classic' by the New York Times Book Review, The Fortunate Pilgrim in its first edition did not sell beyond its first printing and netted Puzo, after nine years of work, $3000. Since then, the unrivaled sucshy; cess of The Godfather (1969) and its film versions has prompted three different publishing houses to rerelease The Fortunate Pilgrim in mass paperback and NBC-TV to produce a mini-series with Sophia Loren in the title role.

As writers of European background like Puzo began the work of second- and third-generation recovery, the business of cultural meshy; diation fell upon writers associated with 'the new ethnics' — those with ancestries in the Caribbean, the Spanish Americas, and the Far East. Soon after the war a diversity of Asian American writers — Carlos Bulosan, Monica Stone, John Okada, Diana Chang, and Louis Chu among them — followed in the steps of Younghill Kang, the Korean-born writer whose East Goes West (1937) is credited with rising above conventions of Asian and Asian American exoticism. At -405- the same time there appeared the first works by immigrants from the Caribbean Rim including Mexico — by Paule Marshall, José Antonio Villarreal, John Rechy, and Piri Thomas. These two coteries of early writers were pioneers in the second era of the literature of cultural mediation.

The year 1964 marked the beginning of a new period in United States immigration and racial politics that completed this transfer of the ethnic literary mantle. In that year, Congress democratized the immigration laws, repealing after almost fifty years the Chinese exshy; clusion and related acts and thus inviting migration from East Asia, Mexico, and the Caribbean as well as, increasingly, from the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. The recent influx may or may not reach as large a percentage of the total United States population as the great migration once did, but the new ethnic groups are of course as distanced from the still-dominant European heritage of the United States as the immigrants of the great migration Southern were from Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. To answer the need for cultural mediashy; tion, there have arisen formidable writers and coteries of writers, who have produced narratives of the new 'new migration' while at the same time (many of them activists and/or scholars) working to defend civil rights, to promote cultural pluralism, and to reclaim nonshy; European contributions to the history of the Continent. Among those of Asian descent, the more prominent have included several Chinese Americans — Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Shawn Wong, Amy Tan, and others — as well as Japanese Canadian Joy Kogawa. Among those to the south, the prominent have ranged from Chishy; canos, including Luis Valdez, Rudolfo Anaya, Richard Rodriguez, and an impressive array of poets, to émigrés from the islands such as Paule Marshall of Barbados, Edward Rivera of Puerto Rico, and Osshy; car Hijuelos of Cuba. Over the past fifteen years or so, these writers have achieved national and sometimes international acclaim as individuals — garnering literary prizes, support for continued work, and honor for their respective communities. Taken together, they are just now receiving widespread identification and praise for penning a new chapter in the history of the American novel: the literature of immigrant 'peoples of color.'

Thomas J. Ferraro

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Race and Region

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the range and experience of writers in the United States broadened. No one literary center predominated, but urbanization and industrialization contributed to large cities remaining the focal points of writerly activity. In the East, New York, long a major center for book and magazine publishing, grew rapidly as a cultural capital attracting men and women of literary ambition from across the nashy; tion. A transforming second city, Chicago functioned as a magnet for talented writers from throughout the Midwest, so much so that by 1912 the converging of artists coalesced in the Chicago Renaissance. In the West, San Francisco continued its rise of literary prominence begun after the Civil War. The South, from upper to lower, began to generate coteries of writers with publishing outlets in its old centers of culture — Richmond, Charleston, Atlanta, Nashville, and New Orshy; leans. By the period of World War I, not only was an expansive literary culture anchored in separate regions apparent but also a genshy; eral movement toward redefining American experience within literary production.

A proliferation of little magazines and literary groups in the Midshy; west, the South, and the Northeast during the postwar years gave greater visibility to an increasing number of aspiring authors, who emerged from diverse socioeconomic levels and who were intent upon writing from their own experiential perspectives. Their perspectives, however, had been substantially altered by a world at war and by an awareness of America in international contexts. Their larger referenshy-407- tial context was a social and political modernity propelling the nation and its regions away from isolation and simplicity and into interdeshy; pendence and complexity.

No small part of the emergent modern experience and its comshy; plexity was the issue of identity — individual, regional, national, the same triumvirate that had in various guises characterized much of the country's history. However, the issue assumed a renewed urgency with the contemporary resituation of the United States, viewed from abroad as an international political power and a world leader in industry and technology, and with a concomitant transformation at home, particularly in population shifts, foreign immigration, and rashy; cial distribution. Industrial and technological advances fueled ecoshy; nomic growth and opened additional marketplaces, but also proshy; pelled the movement from rural to urban areas, the influx of people from other nations, and the migration of African Americans from the South to the North and West. Conventions and habits gave way under the pressures of mobility and motion to new modes of behavshy; ior, language, and dress. Dislocations and disruptions were inevitashy; ble. Old relationships to communal values, to moral codes, to hiershy; archical social positions, and to familiar patterns came under stress and were decentered.

In literature, different sets of external identifications and more varied markers of identity were not only more visible but more viable as well. Racial heritage, regional affiliation, ethnic background, class position, political inclination, gender identity, and sexual orientation appeared more frequently within texts by authors who understood that a writer in the United States no longer had to subsume personal identification into a vision of the artist as male, white, Anglo-Saxon, native-born, upper middle class, and Protestant. For some writers the result