Son of Italy

In the original introduction to Pascal D'Angelo's Son of Italy, the renowned literary critic Carl Van Doren praised D'Angelo's autobiography as an impassioned story of his "enormous struggles against every disadvantage." In his narrative of his fruitless labor as a "pick and shovel" worker in America, D'Angelo, who immigrated from the Abruzzi region of Italy, describes the harsh, often inhumane working conditions that immigrants had to endure at the beginning of the twentieth century. Howev...