Christ In Concrete

Description

Giving voice to the hardworking Italian immigrants who worked, lived, and died in New York City shortly before the Great Depression, this American classic ranks with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as one of the 20th century’s great works of social protest.

Largely autobiographical, Christ in Concrete opens with the dramatic Good Friday collapse of a building under construction, crucifying in concrete an Italian construction worker, whose death leaves his pregnant wife and eight children impoverished. His oldest son, Paul, at just twelve years old, must take over his father’s role—and his job.

Paul’s odyssey into manhood begins on the high girders where death is an occupational hazard and a boy’s dreams are the first fatality. Written in sonorous prose that recalls the speaker’s Italian origins, Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete is at once a powerful social document and a deeply moving story about the American immigrant experience.

About the Author

Pietro Di Donato was an italo-american writer and bricklayer. Born in West Hoboken in 1911 from italian immigrant parents from Vasto (Abruzzo). He had little scholar education but had a huge success with his autobiographical novelChrist in concretepublished in 1939. The novel was inspired by the tragic death at work of his father, Geremia, on Good Friday's morning of 1923 when Pietro was twelve (it is stated that workerPascal D'Angelo, later become a writer too witnessed and reported the tragic event to the family). Pietro himself became a bricklayer like his father.Christ in concreteis based on a short story written in 1937 which was later expanded as a novel. The novel was defined "the bible of proletarian literature", and is written with a mixed language of street slang, biblical language, italian dialects and english sentence-costruction. The book, which portrayed the world of New York's Italian-American construction workers during The Great Depression, was hailed by critics in the United States and abroad as a metaphor for the immigrant experience in America, and cast Di Donato as one of the most celebrated Italian American novelists of the mid-20th century. The great success of the novel lead to a film adaptation in 1949 directed by Edward Dmytryk by the titleGive Us This Day.He also worked as a journalist and became a political activist. He published,This Woman(1958) andThree Circles of Light(1960), respectively the sequel and the prequel of his first novel. He also wrote the biographies of Francesca Saverio Gabrini, the first american saint (Immigrant Saint) and Maria Goretti, an italian girl murdered in 1902 and later canonized.In 1978 his journalistic report about the mysterious kidnapping and murder of italian politicianAldo Moro(titledChrist in Plastic) published in Penthouse magazine won the Overseas Press Club Prize. The article was later adapted into a play entitledMoro.Di Donato died on January 19, 1992 in Stony Brook, Long Island, with his last novel,American Gospels, still unpublished.

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