If a novel lays out an imagined immigration, and poetry offers us a distilled and rarefied immigration, autobiographies provide us with the most real and sincere account of the process and effects of immigration that we could have. Letters also contribute an important voice, but since they are addressed to relatives and friends in the heated immediacy of experience, they don’t offer the comprehensive perspective of autobiography. An autobiography speaks of the wholeness of the experience. It is there that we find the image of the entire person—already shaped, metabolized, and pondered. Immigrants have not only lived the whole...

Most of the autobiographies reviewed in this section are characterized by how central work is to the immigrant’s life. Often the person chose to migrate out of the desire to find or change jobs. Indeed, “work” is an American value that these immigrants have internalized; for most American autobiographies personality alone is not enough to warrant a book. It is the accomplishment, the grand story that provides the impetus to write, and it is the sage advice on how to reproduce such a grand story that provides the reasons for writing it—just look at the extraordinary case of Benjamin...

These Italian immigrants came to America to pursue an artistic dream; but they remain “immigrant workers” at heart. They strongly maintain the ethos of the artisan, with its mixture of manual labor and creativity, more than pretenses of artistic genius. They tell their stories in the quiet mode that links our autobiographies. One of them, especially, who does not find success, Luigi Olari, strikes a very human note in his description of failures. Even the quite known Alfred Crimi, a painter; Pietro Montana, a sculptor; and Luigi Lombardi, an orchestra director, never put on airs about the position they acquired...

Of the next five autobiographies, three are of men for whom years of work gave birth to a new man—a man of God, a convert to spiritual faith. Luigi Turco, Constantine Panunzio, and Antonio Arrighi came to America as immigrant boys. They were not satisfied with the material enrichment the new land could bring; instead they looked to intertwine their immigration toward a better life with their continual search for a higher spiritual life. Immigration was not enough for them to change their existence, as Turco wrote to his son, Lewis Turco (a professor at Potsdam University, poet, and...

It is rare to find women’s voices among immigrant autobiographies. In the early years, there were fewer female than male immigrants, although the proportion increased steadily over the century, comprising a third of the total immigrants in the 1830s but more than half of the total after 1930s.¹ The sample of our women seems to follow that pattern. Only two of them, Rosa Cavalleri and Bruna Pieracci, belong to the earlier type of peasant immigrants. Anna Yona and Amalia Santacaterina were wives of political refugees, a Jew and a Socialist, who emigrated during Fascism. The majority of the women—Giuseppina...

The writers of the autobiographies in this last chapter have achieved success as doctors, professors, or business people, so they belong to a different social class than the rest of our immigrant autobiographers. All share the work ethic that defined our earlier groups of Italian immigrants, but because of intelligence, luck, perseverance, or an indescribable mix of those and other qualities, they have gone on to varying degrees of what we would consider to be success—social, educational, and economic. They view the United States as a land of opportunity, but their standards and their achievements were on a different...