Gabriele D'Annunzio: nella vita e nell'arte [Gabriele D'Annunzio: in Life and in Art]. New York: Cocce Bros., 1938.
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D’Annunzio had a significant impact in the United States among the Italians. In particular, his brand of journalism inspired either admiration or heavy criticism among Italian writers participating in the ongoing debates (see Carnovale’s Il giornalismo degli emigrati italiani nel Nord America) for a hilarious and insightful view of the squabbles of of Italian American journalism.
D’Annunzio’s nationalistic fervor for Italy is considered to have unfortunately helped nurture the climate in which fascism took hold. This work is a long-after-the-fact transcription by Cordiferro of a lecture he gave several times in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, mostly from 1918–1924. Cordiferro's last lecture on D'Annunzio was in March 1938, in the hall of the La Guardia Political Club in New York, just a few days after D’Annunzio’s death.
For a rich discussion of the life of Cordiferro, please see the essay by Francesco Durante, "Riccardo Cordiferro: an Italian American Archetype," on this website.
Here's a brief version of that life: Emigrating with his family to America in 1892, soon thereafter Cordiferro founded the weekly literary magazine La Follia di New York, together with his father Francesco (1839–1928), who was also a poet (q.v. his Lu Ciucciu, in Calabrian dialect), and with his brother Marziale. The work for La Follia, combined with his intense literary productivity, absorbed Cordiferro completely, and gave him a vehicle by which to publish several of his works, such as La vendetta (q.v.). Approbation for the magazine’s notable success on the East Coast led him to make frequent trips throughout the country and beyond to give theatrical presentations and poetry readings, and to engage in debates, very often with political overtones.
Martino Marazzi's Voices of Italian America: a History of Early italian American Literature with a Critical Anthology (Madison, 2004) contains excerpts from his work in translation.
Though not committed to any one strain of leftist thought, Cordiferro maintained close contact with anarchist and socialist circles, which resulted in more than one arrest and constrained him to resign from directing La Follia. In 1895, his drama, Il pezzente [The Tramp], ran for hundreds of performances and became a standard in the repertory of amateur players in revolutionary political circles. See Durante, “Riccardo Cordiferro,” pp. 21–22.
Beyond the political, Cordiferro was perhaps more drawn to satire, the comical, and the sentimental, including songs and Neapolitan impersonations. He wrote poetry all his life, and dedicated himself to comic theater. Cordiferro was principally responsible for the flourishing of colonial poetry: by his decisions of who to publish in La Follia, he became the arbiter between old world and new world literary styles, effectively, a guarantor of the new literary culture of the Italian American colony. He was among the collaborators of Carlo Tresca’s radical newspaper, Il Martello (The Hammer) even into the 1930s.
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