Jerre Mangione (1909–1998)

read 5.2024

For me this contained a wealth of information about the Italian immigrant experience in the US and elsewhere. Many references to other books and materials. Read as part of my research into my family's Italian roots

Gets bogged down by Mangione's over abundant love of juicy gossip about Writer's Project staff, but at first it's fascinating. And the gossip does tell a story: about the utterly quixotic idea of a state bureaucracy employing a lot of dissolute, highly individualistic, egotistical, wayward souls to work on a collective project that marvelously, in its short lifetime, actually largely succeeded in both chronicling and creating the culture of its time.

Excellent, wide-ranging study. Perhaps too "impassioned" as an Irish-American professor told me, but he never heard himself when talking about the Irish-American experience.