Julia Savarese (born 1926) is an American writer. She was born in

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...

. After graduating summa cum laude from

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...

in 1950, she worked as an editor for various publications. Her novels include ''The Weak and the Strong'' (1952), which tells the story of an Italian-American family living in New York during the

Great Depression The Great Depression (19291939) was an economic shock that impacted most countries across the world. It was a period of economic depression that became evident after a major fall in stock prices in the United States. The economic contagio ...

, and ''Final Proof'' (1971), a novel about the death of a publishing empire. She published several plays and received a Ford Foundation grant for playwriting. She also wrote for television, and in 1968 received the Hallmark Television Award. ''The Weak and the Strong'' was one of the earliest novels about growing up as the daughter of Italian immigrants; it defied the stereotypes of "happy-go-lucky" Italian family life. When it was first published, critics called it "bleak," "unrelenting," and "humorless." In ''The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women'' (1985),

Helen Barolini Helen Barolini (born November 18, 1925) is an American writer, editor, and translator. As a second-generation Italian American, Barolini often writes on issues of Italian-American identity.How to count American immigrant generations is a subject ...

suggests that this was largely due to critics' expectations of Italian-American writers, and of women in particular; for a male writer such as Pietro di Donato, or an established woman writer such as Flannery O'Connor, she writes, "that kind of unsentimentality would be ''verismo'' of the highest order." In 1974, Savarese was one of the few women included in

Rose Basile Green Dr. Rose Basile Green (1914-2003) was an American scholar, poet, and educator. Among her publications were a study of Italian-American writers, titled ''The Italian American Novel: A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures'' (1974), and sever ...

's pioneering study of Italian-American writers.

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Savarese, Julia 1926 births American writers of Italian descent American women novelists Hunter College alumni Possibly living people