Outside of New York and the Northeast: San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia

Where else in the U.S. were there Italian populations of sufficient size to support a publishing industry of any size? The collection has works from San Francisco, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, as one might expect, but there are surprises to be found in less likely venues, like Kansas City, Missoula (Montana), Detroit and even Rivesville, WV.

While much of this collection – about half of the ítems in it – was published in the major centers of Italian population in New York City, New Jersey and New England, Italians wrote and published wherever they migrated, such as the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. There, as in New York, Italian writers for the daily or weekly newspapers became book authors at some point. 

Politically active leftist Italians, especially in San Francisco and Chicago, generated some of the most important socialist and anarchist writing.  One of the radical newspapers, Il Proletario (the front page of one issue of which is shown here), moved its headquarters from New York to Chicago and back to New York over the decades. 

On the "bourgeois" literary front, San Francisco probably nurtured the greatest number of capable writers, whether imaginative or non-fiction, including “refugees” from the East Coast like Paolo Pallavicini and Cesare Crespi. Crespi’s non-fiction reportage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is as vivid and engrossing as any account one might find of that catastrophe. And no one better described in biting, but humorous terms, how Italian American journalism was “nothing but an ugly parasitical beast,a ‘filthy fraudulent image invading the world with its stink’” than Chicago-based journalist Luigi Carnovale. 

The two unusual publications from Missoula, Montana, are mathematics texts, in typescript, for Italians interned in a well-documented prisoner camp (largely civilian).