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Like Lesser Gods
''Like Lesser Gods'' is a 1949 novel by Mari Tomasi about the Italian-American stonecutters of Granitetown (a fictionalized version of Barre, Vermont), and their dedication to the work despite the danger of silicosis. Originally published by Bruce, a small Catholic press, it was republished by the New England Press in 1988 and 1999. Story For years, Maria Dalli pleads with her husband Pietro, a granite carver, to take up a less dangerous line of work. Pietro refuses. One day at work, the boss threatens to fire Pietro's co-worker for making a mistake. Pietro tells Maria that if the boss were ever to treat him that way, he would quit. Later, Maria finds out that Pietro has been hard at work on what he considers his masterpiece: a granite headstone in the form of a cross, "smothered" in vines. Remembering what Pietro said about quitting, she wakes in the middle of the night, slips into the shed where Pietro works, and chips away a piece of the stone. Her plan fails: when the work ...
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Mari Tomasi
Mari Tomasi (1907–1965) was an American novelist who portrayed the lives of Italian immigrants in Vermont. Literature professor Thomas J. Ferraro calls her "the first significant Italian American woman novelist." Tomasi also worked as a journalist and local historian, and served a term in the Vermont House of Representatives. Biography Early life and education Mari Tomasi was born on January 30, 1907, in Montpelier, Vermont, the third of five children of Bartolomeo and Margarita Tomasi. Her parents were immigrants from Turin in Northern Italy who owned a grocery and cigar store in Montpelier. Tomasi was born with a disability and walked with a limp; she was taken to Burlington, Vermont, as a child for corrective surgery, which was partially successful. Originally aspiring to practice medicine, Tomasi attended Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and Trinity College in Burlington, Vermont, but left school to work as a journalist. Career She wrote for newspape ...
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Federal Writers' Project
The Federal Writers' Project (FWP) was a federal government project in the United States created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. It was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program. It was one of a group of New Deal arts programs known collectively as Federal Project Number One or Federal One. The FWP employed thousands of people and produced hundreds of publications, including state guides, city guides, local histories, oral histories, ethnographies, and children's books. In addition to writers, the project provided jobs to unemployed librarians, clerks, researchers, editors, and historians. Background Funded under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, the FWP was established July 27, 1935, by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Henry Alsberg, a journalist, playwright, theatrical producer, and human-rights activist, directed the program from 1935 to 1939. In 1939, Alsberg was fired, federal funding was cut, ...
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Italian-American Culture In Vermont
Italian Americans ( it, italoamericani or ''italo-americani'', ) are Americans who have full or partial Italians, Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeastern United States, Northeast and industrial Midwestern United States, Midwestern urban areas, metropolitan areas, with significant communities also residing in many other major US metropolitan areas. Between 1820 and 2004 approximately 5.5 million Italian diaspora, Italians migrated from Italy to the United States, in several distinct waves, with the greatest number arriving in the 20th century from Southern Italy. Initially, many Italian immigrants (usually single men), so-called “birds of passage”, sent remittance back to their families in Italy and, eventually, returned to Italy; however, many other immigrants eventually stayed in the United States, creating the large Italian-American communities that exist today. In 1870, prior to the large wave of Italian immigrants ...
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Italian-American Novels
Italian Americans ( it, italoamericani or ''italo-americani'', ) are Americans who have full or partial Italian ancestry. The largest concentrations of Italian Americans are in the urban Northeast and industrial Midwestern metropolitan areas, with significant communities also residing in many other major US metropolitan areas. Between 1820 and 2004 approximately 5.5 million Italians migrated from Italy to the United States, in several distinct waves, with the greatest number arriving in the 20th century from Southern Italy. Initially, many Italian immigrants (usually single men), so-called “birds of passage”, sent remittance back to their families in Italy and, eventually, returned to Italy; however, many other immigrants eventually stayed in the United States, creating the large Italian-American communities that exist today. In 1870, prior to the large wave of Italian immigrants to the United States, there were fewer than 25,000 Italian immigrants in America, many of them ...
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Novels Set In Vermont
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, typically written in prose and published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the la, novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of ''novellus'', diminutive of ''novus'', meaning "new". Some novelists, including Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ann Radcliffe, John Cowper Powys, preferred the term "romance" to describe their novels. According to Margaret Doody, the novel has "a continuous and comprehensive history of about two thousand years", with its origins in the Ancient Greek and Roman novel, in Chivalric romance, and in the tradition of the Italian renaissance novella.Margaret Anne Doody''The True Story of the Novel'' New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, rept. 1997, p. 1. Retrieved 25 April 2014. The ancient romance form was revived by Romanticism, especially the historica ...
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1949 American Novels
Events January * January 1 – A United Nations-sponsored ceasefire brings an end to the Indo-Pakistani War of 1947. The war results in a stalemate and the division of Kashmir, which still continues as of 2022. * January 2 – Luis Muñoz Marín becomes the first democratically elected Governor of Puerto Rico. * January 11 – The first "networked" television broadcasts take place, as KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania goes on the air, connecting east coast and mid-west programming in the United States. * January 16 – Şemsettin Günaltay forms the new government of Turkey. It is the 18th government, last single party government of the Republican People's Party. * January 17 – The first VW Type 1 to arrive in the United States, a 1948 model, is brought to New York by Dutch businessman Ben Pon. Unable to interest dealers or importers in the Volkswagen, Pon sells the sample car to pay his travel expenses. Only two 1949 models are sold in America that ...
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Common Ground (magazine)
''Common Ground'' was a literary magazine published quarterly between 1940 and 1949 by the Common Council for American Unity to further an appreciation of contributions to U.S. culture by many ethnic, religions and national groups. Founding The magazine was created by attorney Read Lewis (1887–1984), who helped found the Settlement House Movement, Slovenian American author Louis Adamic (aka Alojz Adamič) and M. Margaret Anderson. The Carnegie Corporation of New York provided funding to start the new magazine. The name of the magazine was likely taken from the title of a book of the same name published by a leading member of the interfaith movement in 1938. Early staff included include the future senator Alan Cranston and the poet Charles Olson. Louis Adamic was instrumental in the founding of the magazine. In 1940 he became the director of the Common Council for American Unity (CCAU) and became the founding editor. A prolific writer in the 1930s, Adamic had begun a writing care ...
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Christ In Concrete
''Christ in Concrete'' is a 1939 novel by Pietro Di Donato about Italian-American construction workers. The book, which made Di Donato famous overnight, was originally published by ''Esquire Magazine'' as a short story in 1937, and subsequently expanded into a novel by the 28-year-old Di Donato. The novel was inspired by the death of Di Donato's father in a construction accident on Good Friday in 1923. It tells the story of a bricklayer and his struggle to provide a home for his family. As indicated by the title, the novel is noted for its rich religious imagery, presented in a largely modernist stream-of-consciousness style. It was adapted into a 1949 motion picture, '' Give Us This Day'', directed by Edward Dmytryk. The movie's background, the director's Hollywood blacklisting, and subsequent debut of the film in England, is covered on the Di Donato website. Plot I. Geremio: Geremio and his coworkers are gruesomely killed on the job when the building they are working on colla ...
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Émile Zola
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (, also , ; 2 April 184029 September 1902) was a French novelist, journalist, playwright, the best-known practitioner of the literary school of naturalism, and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France and in the exoneration of the falsely accused and convicted army officer Alfred Dreyfus, which is encapsulated in his renowned newspaper opinion headlined ''J'Accuse…!'' Zola was nominated for the first and second Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901 and 1902. Early life Zola was born in Paris in 1840 to François Zola (originally Francesco Zolla) and Émilie Aubert. His father was an Italian engineer with some Greek ancestry, who was born in Venice in 1795, and engineered the Zola Dam in Aix-en-Provence; his mother was French. The family moved to Aix-en-Provence in the southeast when Émile was three years old. Four years later, in 1847, his father die ...
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Italian Americana
''Italian Americana'' is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering studies on the Italian-American experience. It publishes history, fiction, memoirs, poetry, and reviews. The editor-in-chief is Carla A. Simonini ( Loyola University Chicago). History The journal was established in 1974 by Richard Gambino, Ernest Falbo, and Bruno Arcudi under the auspices of Queens College, City University of New York, where Gambino taught. In 1989, Carol Bonomo Albright became editor, and the journal was published by the University of Rhode Island. Other notable assistant editors have included novelist Christine Palamidessi Moore and poets Dana Gioia, past Director of the National Endowment for the Arts, Michael Palma and Maria Terrone. Simonini became editor in 2015, and the journal moved to Youngstown State University Youngstown State University (YSU or Youngstown State) is a public university in Youngstown, Ohio. It was founded in 1908 and is the easternmost member of the Univ ...
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American Literature
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition thus is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature of other traditions produced in the United States and in other immigrant languages. Furthermore, a rich tradition of oral storytelling exists amongst Native American tribes. The American Revolutionary Period (1775–1783) is notable for the political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. An early novel is William Hill Brown's ''The Power of Sympathy'' published in 1791. Writer and critic John Neal in the early-mid nineteenth century helped advance America's progress toward a unique literature and culture, by criticizing predecessors like Washington Irving for imitating their British counterparts and influencing others like Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe took American p ...
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