This book presents for the first time in English a substantial choice of texts (excerpts from novels, short stories, memoirs, and poems), written in Italian by first-generation immigrants. Marazzi, a specialist in Italo-American cultural relations, introduces here the lives and works of a number of novelists, poets, activists, and journalists, who wrote for the myriad of newspapers published all around the country. There are authors of serialized novels (the "mysteries" of downtown Manhattan), N.Y.P.D. cops, and nationalists extolling the virtues of the Duce, as well as red anarchists, ladies, and "flappers" from the Italian American middle class, and proletarian rhetoricians.