Pietro di Donato

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Pietro di Donato (born April 3, 1911 in West Hoboken , New Jersey , † January 19, 1992 in Stony Brook , Long Island) was an Italian-American writer, best known for his novel Christ in Concrete .

Life

Pietro di Donato was the eldest of eight children of the mason Geremio (Christian name: Geremia) di Donato and his wife Annunziata Cinquina. His parents immigrated to the USA from Taranta Peligna near Vasto in Abruzzo . When Pietro di Donato was eleven years old, his father had a fatal accident on Good Friday 1923 when the building on which he was working collapsed.

Construction workers in New York

As the eldest son, he had to leave school at the age of 13 to help his mother support the family. He hired himself - friends of his father made this possible - as a bricklayer's assistant. The death of his mother a few years later made him the sole breadwinner of his seven siblings. Further accidents at work, in which his godfather and an uncle died, made him doubt the Catholic faith of his childhood. The day after the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti , he joined the Young Communist League , the youth organization of the Communist Party of the United States . Years later, deeply disappointed, he turned away from communism. Despite the heavy physical work, he attended evening classes to supplement his incomplete schooling. A strike gave him the opportunity to go to a library, while unemployment during the Great Depression gave him time to read. So he discovered the work of Zola , Balzac and Turgenew and under this impression decided to write himself.

Christ in concrete

1937 Pietro di Donato published in the magazine Esquire his first short story: Christ in Concrete ( Christ in Concrete ), which is based on the fatal accident at work of his father. Christ in Concrete was enthusiastically received by readers and critics, published as a separate print and included in several anthologies (including Best Short Stories of 1938 ).

Di Donato then decided to expand the short story, which became the first chapter in it, into a novel of the same name. Significantly autobiographical, he describes the everyday life of an Italian immigrant family in New York in the 1920s. The English title Christ in Concrete can be as Di Donato known even at a reading, both interpretations open: On the one hand, says Christ in concrete = in the concrete , as if walled - in a modern crucifixion - in the perilous work out of it for the There is no way out for builders, " because in this world only the good are crucified ". He on the other hand thinks Christ concrete = concrete whose successor realize the workers and their families in mutual aid.

The novel was published in 1939 and was an overwhelming success, thanks in part to reviews in the New York Times ; in Publishers Weekly , The Nation , New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement . The reviews emphasized the extraordinary language, the "poetry of spoken Italian in written English", as well as the haunting description of the living conditions in the immigrant neighborhoods of New York , as they had never been presented in literature. The first edition of 200,000 copies was sold out within a few weeks; exceeded the million mark after a few months. Christ in Concrete has been translated into 19 languages.

Freelance writer

The success of his first novel allowed Pietro di Donato to give up his job as a bricklayer and live as a freelance writer. In 1941, his one-act play The Loves of Annunziata, about his parents' love story, premiered and was included in the American Scenes and Best One-Act Plays of 1941 anthologies . In the following year, after the USA entered World War II, he refused military service for reasons of conscience and worked as a forest worker in a Quaker camp in Cooperstown . There he met Helen Dean; they married in 1943 and moved to Setauket , Long Island .

Di Donato did not succeed in repeating the success of his first work. Between 1941 and 1958 he only published short stories in magazines. The high expectations raised by Christ in Concrete paralyzed him. It was not until 1958, 19 years after Christ in Concrete , that his second novel appeared: This Woman (German: Lust will Ewigkeit ), which ties in with the family story that began with Christ in Concrete , and in 1960 as Three Circles of Light, the third part of the family saga, the goes back to the years before Geremio's accident in 1923. Three Circles of Light was translated under the title Das Fest des Leben by Arno Schmidt , who loved Pietro di Donato.

In the early 1960s Pietro di Donato found his way back to the Catholic faith. Two hagiographic works testify to this : Immigrant Saint (1960) about Franziska Xaviera Cabrini , the first American woman to be canonized , and The Penitent (1962) about St. Maria Goretti and the repentance and purification of her murderer. The last work by Di Donato that received great attention was his report Christ in Plastic (1978), based on months of research in Italy, about the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro , from which his play Moro emerged .

In the last years of his life, Pietro di Donato experienced the satisfaction of a "rediscovery" of his work. The reason was the growing interest on the one hand in “ethnic” literature (literature of ethnic groups in the USA) and, on the other hand, in “proletarian” literature, especially in “blue-collar novels” (novels by workers).

Literary meaning

Pietro di Donato is one of the US authors who turned the predominant view of the world of immigrants and the working class, which prevailed well into the 20th century: from writing about them (with all the clichés) to looking inside. " There was no poet who measured the rhythm of the souls from the stone, no artist to paint the sour sweat of Christian people as it mixed with red brick and gray mortar ." Christ in Concrete is now an "American classic" and is heard on the canon of the study of American literature in the 20th century.

In Italy, the Premio Pietro Di Donato was donated in memory of Pietro di Donato on the occasion of his 100th birthday . This recognizes journalistic contributions that are characterized by moral courage and draw attention to precarious working conditions.

Works

First editions

  • Christ in concrete. 1939
  • This woman. 1958
  • Three Circles of Light. 1960
  • Immigrant Saint. The Life of Mother Cabrini. 1960
  • The Penitent. 1962
  • Naked Author. 1970
  • The American Gospels. 2000 (from the estate)

Novels in German translation

  • Lust wants eternity. Zsolnay, Hamburg 1960
  • Christ in concrete. Zsolnay, Hamburg 1961
  • The festival of life. Nannen, Hamburg 1962

literature

  • Rose Basile Green: The Italian-American Novel. A Document of the Interaction of Two Cultures . Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Rutherford 1974. ISBN 0-838612-87-3 .
  • Matthew Diomede: Pietro di Donato, the Master Builder . Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg 1995. ISBN 0-8387-5289-6 .
  • Louise Napolitano: An American Story: Pietro DiDonato's Christ in Concrete . Peter Lang, New York 1995. ISBN 0-8204-2094-8 .
  • Kenneth Gulotta: Down from Italy. The fall and rise of Italian American modernist fiction . Dissertation, Tulane University, New Orleans 2008. UMI Dissertation Publishing 2011. ISBN 9781243508010 . In it chapter 4 about Pietro di Donato.

Movies

  • Christ in Concrete is the template for Edward Dmytryk's feature film Give Us This Day ( House of Longing ) .
  • In 2006 Stefano Falco traced the life, work and impact of the “writer-mason” in his documentary Pietro Di Donato, lo scrittore muratore .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Premio Pietro Di Donato ( Memento of the original dated December 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 34 kB) @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.premiopietrodidonato.it
  2. ↑ a b Dennis Wepman: Di Donato, Pietro . In: American National Biography Online
  3. ↑ a b c Thomas J. Schoenberg (ed.): Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism , Vol. 159. Gale, Detroit 2005. Therein: Di Donato, Pietro , 1911-1992.
  4. ↑ Fred L. Gardaphé: Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative . Duke University Press, Durham 1996. ISBN 0-8223-1730-3 .
  5. ↑ Helen Barolini: Di Donato, Pietro . In: Salvatore La Gumina u. a. (Ed.): The Italian American Experience. To Encyclopedia . Garland, New York 2000. ISBN 0-8153-0713-6 . Pp. 182-183.
  6. ↑ a b Carol Strickland: An Immigrant's Pain in Concrete . In: New York Times , October 14, 1990.
  7. ^ Pietro di Donato: Christ in concrete . rororo, 1964. p. 134.
  8. ^ Pietro di Donato: Christ in concrete . rororo, 1964. p. 2.
  9. ^ Obituary by Richard Severo in the New York Times , January 21, 1992.
  10. ^ Matthew Diomede: Pietro di Donato, the Master Builder . Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg 1995. ISBN 0-8387-5289-6 . P. 102.
  11. ↑ Sacvan Bercovitch (ed.): The Cambridge History of American Literature , Vol. 6: Prose Writing 1910-1950 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2002. ISBN 0-521-49731-0 . In it the chapter Ethnic Modernism .
  12. ↑ See the foreword by Studs Terkel to the new edition of Christ in Concrete . New American Library, New York 2004 (reprinted as Centennial Edition 2011). ISBN 978-0-451-52575-8 .
  13. ^ Pietro di Donato: Christ in concrete . rororo, 1964. p. 119.
  14. ↑ Werner Sollors : Ethnic modernism . Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2008. ISBN 978-0-674-03091-6 . Pp. 135 and pp. 175-177.
  15. ↑ http://www.premiopietrodidonato.it , accessed on October 18, 2012
  16. ↑ House of Sehnsucht in the IMDb
personal data
SURNAME Di Donato, Pietro
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Donato, Pietro di; DiDonato, Pietro
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-American writer
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Hoboken, New Jersey
DATE OF DEATH January 19, 1992
Place of death Stony Brook