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Jerre Mangione: The
Man and His Work “One can find many
themes in Mangione’s works,” writes critic and author Ben Morreale of Jerre
Mangione, “but one which runs through all of them is a search” (“Jerre
Mangione” 9).[1] Morreale sees it as a perennial quest
for a place “as safe as home,” but it is much broader. In Mangione’s first
novel, it is true a group of anti-Fascist refugees flees towards safety in a
new world. But in the second, a son hunts for his father’s murderer in order
to find peace for himself. And among the other things sought for in
Mangione’s autobiographical writings are love, artistic fulfillment,
political justice, and accommodation between past and present. Like any good writer,
in fact, he is constantly looking for truth. It is one of his great strengths
that he never lapses into the conviction that he has found it. Mangione is a
humanist whose skepticism is tempered by inner warmth. He is a master of
controlled story-telling, who generates narrative drive from irony and
understatement. Committed to the writer’s craft but always busy in the world,
he has enfolded a life spent among workers, bohemians, bureaucrats, teachers,
and artists in ten books, five of them drawn directly from his life
experiences. All flow with the deceptive simplicity achieved by hard work.
All are peopled with deftly-drawn characters who are authentic, paid-up cast
members of the human comedy. All are in the voice of one whose ideals are
large, but never allowed to throw reality into shadow. Can a writer marry an
unsentimental view of the world to a temperament that is basically
life-embracing? Mangione does so, and it all begins with the duality of his
own nature. A child of two worlds, he is Sicilian by blood and affection,
American by birthplace and conviction. His earliest memory is of looking out
on America from behind the invisible walls of an ethnic enclave in Rochester,
New York, where he was born (as Gerlando Mangione) on March 20, 1909. In
fact, Mangione can be classified as a major spokesman among the children of
the huge immigrant wave of the young twentieth century, but the statement
narrows his range too much. He does not swim easily with any school. As a toddler peering
through the picket fence, Mangione could only wonder what the
English-speaking children beyond it could be saying to each other. By
parental edict, only the Sicilian dialect of Italian was spoken in the
Mangione home. His mother and father, unwilling to learn English, did not
want the gap between parent and child widened by different tongues. The
father was a pastry-maker who could find only blue-collar work in America.
His traditional role of family dictator was softened by exuberance and
affection. The mother was “a woman of strong spirit, yet compassionate and
with a liberal turn of mind that seemed surprising in one with only a couple
of years of elementary school education” (Mount
Allegro 1981, 298). The Mangiones were
part of a large, boisterous group of relatives who ate, drank, quarreled and
made music together on any conceivable pretext, being “as gregarious as ants”
(Mount Allegro 1981, 291). Part of
their instinct for protective huddling was a defense against a hostile
America that stereotyped all Sicilians as ignorant criminals. Part arose as
well from their special Sicilian outlook on life, namely that it was short,
dangerous and controlled by a destiny indifferent to the merits of those whom
it randomly struck down. Mangione would learn in time that the inhabitants of
the beautiful and impoverished island of his parents’ birth are a rare breed.
They are vengeful, jealous, parochial, and superstitious. But they are also
compassionate, honorable, and generous with their own, and wonderfully tough,
the still-unbroken survivors of centuries of invasion by, among others,
Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Spaniards, and Germans. They hunger for life
and for dreams that often take the shape of fantastic stories. As an adult, Mangione
came to appreciate and to draw on these qualities of his patrimony. But in
childhood he was painfully embarrassed by his enfolding and noisy family, and
eager to be accepted by the cooler “Anglo-Saxon” world outside of the
neighborhood. Once he began school and learned English, he led three lives.
One was in the “old world” surroundings of home. Another was a contradictory
existence among schoolmates who, in many cases, were equally marginal Polish
and Jewish immigrant youngsters. All of them were conscientiously inoculated
in the classroom with the American gospel of success and striving. Mangione’s
third life was a secret one, “fueled by piles of books from the public
library (mostly fictional) which I read clandestinely in deference to my mother’s
belief that too much reading could drive a person insane” (World Authors 1975-80). Shy and
introverted youngsters who seek a bookish refuge from conflict are prone to
turn into writers. Mangione was no exception. By the time he was in high
school he had become editor of the school paper, won his first literary prize
(a Baldwin apple from the teacher’s own orchard) and was showing the usual
stigmata of the arty teenager, at least outside of his home. Flight from the
family after high school graduation in 1928 was not easy. “A good Sicilian
son stuck near his family. . . . Life, after all, was being with one another” (Mount Allegro 227). Even more
incomprehensible than “Gerlando’s” wish to go away to college was his stated
desire to write for a living rather than to become a doctor, lawyer, or
pharmacist. But consent was finally won to attend Syracuse University, only
ninety miles away. There he worked hard at a variety of part-time jobs and
engaged in several extra-curricular, journalistic activities that consumed
more of his time than any classroom studies. Faithful to his continuing
self-education in writing, he became a daily columnist for the University’s Daily Orange and resurrected the
campus literary magazine, The Chap
Book. His ambition to become a writer was fed by interviews with an array
of contemporary literary stars who visited Syracuse—among them G. K.
Chesterton, Carl Sandburg, John Cowper Pawys, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. He
was also encouraged by members of the English Department who recognized his
talent. One of them, Burges Johnson, achieved the feat of arranging a job in
New York on the staff of Time
magazine just after Mangione’s 1931 graduation in the bleakest abyss of the
Depression. It was a mismatch.
Within a short time Mangione quit the post, mainly because he did not fit
into Time’s mechanical pattern of
organization. He was first assigned to Business and Finance about which he
knew nothing; then to Milestones for which he cared less. For the three years
after his resignation he subsisted through a series of odd jobs for which he
was, in his own words, absurdly unqualified—bookkeeper, librarian, and store
clerk. He was in constant fear of being driven back home by poverty, but in
1934 he finally became an editor at a small publishing house run by Robert
McBride, a job that gave him contact with important writers of the 1930s.
Meanwhile, he kept on with his writing apprenticeship, turning out book and
play reviews for liberal and radical magazines that paid little or nothing. The economic pinch
did not dampen his youthful zest for new experiences. He moved to Greenwich
Village and became a New York intellectual in earnest, living with (and
loving) several mistresses, drinking with both real and phony pets and
artists in cheap cafes, attending plays and jazz performances, and clearly
enjoying the ribaldry and revelry which managed to survive the surrounding
meagerness and misery. But the compassionate and idealistic elements in him
could not be blinded, and they led him into what he later described as “the
left-winged whirl.” Mangione did not join the Communist Party, but from 1932
until 1934 he did “fellow-travel” with other leftist liberati in a “front”
organization, the John Reed Club. He also wrote for the New Masses and the Daily
Worker. To him, as to many others, Communism then seemed to have the
least hesitant prescription for action against economic injustice at home and
Fascist tyranny abroad. Anti-Fascism had
special import to Mangione, since Mussolini’s rise to power had sharply divided
the Italian-American community. He himself was naturally on close terms with
New York anti-Fascists like Carlo Tresca. Among his Rochester friends and
kin, however, there were those who saw no evil in a man who had, as they saw
it, made Italy strong and proud. Mussolini was not a political abstraction,
but a personal shadow over Mangione’s life. This was all the more true since
he was gradually becoming more deeply interested in his roots. “Separated
though I was from my Sicilian relatives,” he wrote later, “my bond with them
grew stronger through the years. . . . I found myself admiring
[them] for some of the same qualities I had once disliked, and wishing I
could share their warm and easy acceptance of life” (Mount Allegro 238). Determined to explore the source of his
ethnic identity firsthand, and too impatient to await the hoped-for
destruction of Fascism, Mangione borrowed three hundred dollars and booked
passage for Italy in the Spring of 1936 after tumultuous family farewells in
Rochester. It was a risky
undertaking, since his anti-Fascist writings (even under pseudonyms) could
easily have been reported to Mussolini’s police. He spent much of the trip,
he recalls, “almost paranoid in my fear that the Fascist authorities would
forcefully induct me into the Italian army and ship me to Ethiopia” (An Ethnic At Large, 1978, 180). Fear
aside he enjoyed the trip. He savored the beauty of the island and the vital
warmth of his homeland relatives, which was barely dampened by their poverty
and by the police-state chill that haunted their spontaneous political
utterances. He left the island with his duality fixed in his soul, more than
ever convinced of his Sicilian-ness, and more grateful than ever to be
American. On his return to New
York, Mangione made a change of base. Bored with his job at McBride, and
eager to find work of greater social significance, he took a job as an
“information specialist” with the Resettlement Administration early in 1937.
Becoming a public-relations writer for a New Deal agency was a pragmatic
outlet for his reformist urges, and an important personal move, since it took
him from New York to a completely different scene in Washington. There, he
made the acquaintance of two top executives of the Federal Writers Project of
the Works Progress Administration, who swiftly recruited him to join the
Project as it put thousands of unemployed writers to work compiling (among
other things) an American Guide Series that would constitute a unique
collective self-portrait of a people. Mangione was to be “national
coordinating editor,” charged with finding sponsors and publishers for the
slowly emerging volumes. The pay was small, the hours long, and confusion and
criticism abounded. But his immersion in the Project, he says, “acted as a
powerful tonic on my spirits . . . My colleagues and I were
literally making history. . . . Each of us suspected that never
again might we know a means of earning a livelihood that involved us as fully
and selflessly” (An Ethnic 225).
The two years of his work there were a continuing seminar in American
culture. Settled in the capital city with a satisfying cause, job and
mistress, Mangione had entered fully into the world beyond the picket fence
around his childhood home. But 1938 brought a
crisis and a major change. Mangione suffered a nearly fatal bout of
pneumonia. During his long convalescence he decided that, approaching his
thirtieth birthday, he must “pay more attention to what I wanted to do most:
read more extensively and write, especially write.” The material for a first
book was under his nose, in “the struggles and foibles of my immigrant
relatives” (An Ethnic 180). On the
heels of this resolution, he lost his job as Congress ended funding for the
Writers Project. What would have been a disaster in other circumstances
provided him with a long, uninterrupted period to work on the manuscript at
Yaddo and on the farm of his friend, Kenneth Burke. In 1940 he returned to
government service first as a speech writer, then as Special Assistant to the
U.S. Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, to help with the
difficult public relations aspects of administering the wartime registration
and control of aliens of enemy nationality. In 1942 the agency was moved to
Philadelphia, which was ultimately to become Mangione’s permanent home. He
was there in 1942 when his manuscript—accepted by the first publisher to read
it—appeared in print under the title of Mount
Allegro. Originally meant to
be a straightforward memoir, it was reclassified at the last moment as fiction
when the publisher decided that it would sell better that way. Reluctantly,
Mangione changed the names of his family and relatives, and gave the
neighborhood—and the book “Mount Allegro”—the name of “a little hick town on
the outskirts of Agrigento, in Sicily, where some of my relatives had come
from” (Philadelphia Inquirer, May
8, 1986). (Years later, Rochester would officially adopt the name for the
area and designate it with a historic marker.) Mangione was apprehensive that
there would be little interest in stories about a people who had suffered a
generally bad image and with whom Americans were at war. But the book became
an instant success. It briefly made the bestseller list, missed
Book-of-the-Month Club selection by one vote, and was to stay in print in one
form or another for the next forty-four years. Deservedly so.
Mangione had achieved a perfect distance between himself and his beginnings.
He painted his relatives, their friends, their beliefs and their stories with
positively Dickensian richness. Critics found Mangione “a born natural” as a
story teller and described the work as “wise,” “merry” and “tender.”[2] Numerous Italian Americans who read it
were especially grateful that it dispelled the Mafia-dominated fantasies of
Sicilian life promoted by the media. Scholars still rely on Mount Allegro as a more precise
description of acculturation that the mythical “melting pot.” It furnishes,
in the words of one sociologist, “a fine-grained account of successful and
failed ventures in upward mobility” (Mount
Allegro xi). But most of all the
book was a coming of age for the author. He had, to paraphrase Eliot, arrived
where he started and known the place for the first time. He had also found an
ideal voice and viewpoint—that of the involved but self-aware observer who
can be candid, funny, loving and objective all at once. He would go on to
publish two novels, a book of short satires, and several works of
straightforward history and journalism. But his most impressive works would
be those that were memoir-like in form: one straightforward autobiography,
two books about Sicilian experiences, and one on the Federal Writers Project.
He balances the roles of reporter/historian and autobiographer much as he
handles the twin roles of Sicilian and American, and is rarely so keen-eyed
as when squarely on the middle of the seesaw. During the next
several years, Mangione found time to complete his first novel, The Ship and the Flame, which appeared
in 1948. It is, in one sense a “topical” novel, based on the plight of
wartime refugees and displaced persons. Its setting is a neutral Portuguese
liner, bound for Mexico and crowded with passengers escaping Fascist and Nazi
jailers in their homelands. When the Mexican government refuses them
admission, they face the threat of a forced return to almost certain death.
The drama of the work stems from how the major characters—among them an
Austrian writer, his Polish mistress, and an Italian professor—respond
intellectually and emotionally to the prospect of extinction. On one level it
is suspense-adventure; on another, an indictment of totalitarian cruelty’s
effect. But Mangione’s root concern is with the mysteries of character, the
ambiguities of choice in the face of the seemingly inevitable. “None of his
refugees is all hero, and none of his characters is all villain,” said Lewis
Gannett in the New York Herald Tribune.[3] Deals, betrayals and sacrifices are
interspersed with earthy drinking, sex and argument. These narrative episodes
deliver the novel from the danger of overworking the familiar metaphor of
life-as-voyage. Both of Mangione’s novels have a sociological and
philosophical tinge, but he is foremost a spinner of tales. “Blessings should
be showered on any novelist who can tell a story,” John Cournos wrote in the Philadelphia Bulletin, “and certainly
Mr. Mangione knows how to tell one.”[4] In 1947, Mangione
applied for and got a Guggenheim Fellowship to return to Sicily and find out
how the long night of Fascism and war had affected the psyche of the island
which was, as he says, in his blood. “A dictatorship that lasted for more
than twenty years,” ran his prospectus, “is not likely to leave the spirit of
a people unharmed . . . What happens in Sicily during the next few
years should concern all who realize . . . that the military
liberation of a people . . . is one thing; its convalescence into a
healthy, self-governing body is quite another” (Reunion in Sicily 1984, 3). The result of the
trip was Reunion in Sicily (1950),
praised by Quincy Howe, in a television review, as having “the ingredients of
a minor classic.”[5] Another reviewer, in the Boston Post, discerned that Mangione
possessed “an American eye but a Sicilian heart.”[6] What the eye saw reassured the heart
concerning Sicily’s spirit. The island still had its rubble piles (both from
bombing and recent earthquakes) and it was stalked by disease and poverty.
Yet the old indomitability persisted. The countryside was still “the
God-graced garden” of his parents’ recollection (Reunion 78). Relatives who could barely feed themselves proudly
insisted on his being their guest. Sicilians argued about God, honor and
destiny with the old passion, and now were free to add politics to the list
as Christian Democrats, Socialists and Communists vied for votes. “In retrospect,”
Mangione concluded, “the spiritual ease I found among Sicilians was the most
surprising feature of my sojourn . . . I felt myself in the
presence of an ancient wisdom that transcended all defeat. . . .
The hangdog look I saw during fascism was gone; so were the strutting
patriots and the fake nationalism. There was life galore—vibrant, warm, and
poignantly human” (Reunion 276). As always, the force
of the book lies as much in Mangione’s style of personal revelation as in his
observations. From the moment when he becomes intrigued with an
Italian-American woman on shipboard, to the last chapter where he rescinds
his decision to marry a Sicilian girl, the reader becomes his companion and
confidante. In the midst of minor defeats and conflicts, laughter runs
through the pages, beginning when Mangione is crammed into a cabin with eight
room-mates, one of whom is a prodigious snorer. “Most snorers have a single
theme. Mr. Placido had a dozen, all of them complex and gruesome, each one
expressing all the baseness of the human soul” (Reunion 22). Or again, there is the bargaining session between
Mangione’s uncle and a Neapolitan taxi driver: The driver told of
the number of mouths he had to feed, of the exorbitant prices he paid for
rent, gasoline, and repairs, and called us “extortionists.” My uncle
countered with a recital of the large number of children he had to support,
his wife’s recent illness, the tiny salary he earned, the exorbitant price of
bread and macaroni, and called him a “dirty capitalist.” (Reunion 32) This kind of humor is
Mangione’s vehicle for dealing with what would otherwise be painful—and
painful, even tragic stories, abound all around him. His laughter is not
dismissive. It is his own expression of Sicilian courage in the face of the
inevitable or incomprehensible. At about this time,
Mangione left government service after ten years, and worked at a series of
what he refers to as “9-to-5 jobs” in advertising and public relations. He
has said little of this period to interviewers. Presumably it was
unsatisfying because it left him short of time for writing. No new book
appeared for fifteen years after Reunion
in Sicily. But as he reached his fifties, Mangione settled finally into a
life pattern of only slightly hampered productivity. In 1957 he married the
painter Patricia Anthony, and four years later (with only a Bachelor of Arts
degree to his credit) he joined the faculty of the University of
Pennsylvania, becoming, a few years later, a full professor of American
literature and Director of Penn’s creative writing program. Upon reaching the
age of retirement, he became founding director of the Italian Studies Center
at Penn. In 1980, the University awarded him the honorary degree of Doctor of
Letters. Mangione deliberately deferred the plunge into academic life “in the
belief that many a would-be writer has fallen by the wayside by becoming a
teacher too early in life” (World
Authors 497). He had certainly gotten beyond that point. Between 1965 and
1978 he published seven more books. The first of these
was his second novel, Night Search
(1965) which was perhaps stimulated by the unsolved murder of Mangione’s old
anti-Fascist friend Carlo Tresca, gunned down on a New York street in 1943.
The hero of Night Search is the
illegitimate son of a Tresca-like murdered labor leader. Shaken by the
suicide of his wife, Michael Malory sets out years later to find his father’s
assassin and in the process to learn more about his past and himself. The
action moves from New York to Provincetown to a fictitious upstate New York
town of “Nightingale-on-Hudson.” The climax is a surprise, and unexpected
character reversals reinforce the sense that humanity is complex, and justice
and revenge are not the simple goals they appear to be. Told in tautly
dramatic scenes, Night Search was
characterized by the Oxford Mail,
to Mangione’s delight, as “a philosophical thriller.”[7] In Night
Search, a mere 228 pages long, Mangione seemed to have reached the limits
of compression, but in Life Sentences
for Everybody (1965) he proved that he could go even further. The book is
a slim collection of what might be called “mini-novels,” each packaged in a
single sentence about a single character (and printed in poem-like format on
a single page.) Mangione wrote them (and many that he did not include) as a
game to relax after a day of serious work. “All the characters represented
here,” he explains on the dust jacket, “were conceived in the author’s
imagination. Nevertheless, he hopes they bear some resemblance to some
people.” He proceeds, thereafter, to vent his rage or his wit on various
targets in exquisitely chiselled phrases. One example gives the flavor: TIMOTHY JEZEBEL He was so normal in so many respects that he became the flop of every party until one day he wised up and boned up on a rare neurosis which, after enacting enough times in the right places, won him social acceptance and subsequently so much affluence that today he goes nowhere unless accompanied by three different psychiatrists, one of each school and sex. Other victims are
pretentious professors, phony liberals, lecherous celebrities, and a complete
gallery of exposed fakes who bear “some resemblance to some people.”
Playfully murderous and moralizing, Life
Sentences for Everybody is Aesop without animals, Ambrose Bierce without
bitterness, Spoon River Anthology
with laughs. After this satirist’s
holiday, idealism sent Mangione back to Sicily for a third time in 1965,
which was a crowded year for him. This time it was to do the research that
resulted in his next (1968) work, A
Passion for Sicilians: The World Around Danilo Dolci. Dolci is an Italian
reformer, a Gandhi-like apostle of nonviolence and personal simplicity. In
the 1950s he had begun to organize the peasants of Sicily to undertake acts
of civil disobedience in order to force the government to provide them with
land reclamation, electric power, jobs, health care, education, and other
services that they desperately needed. Mangione was attracted by what he
heard of this educated architect who was compassionately trying to bring the
poor of Sicily into the modern world against the objections of their powerful
oppressors and their own ingrained fatalism. He spent several months living
in Sicily with Patricia, talked with Dolci’s supporters and enemies, travelled
extensively, and renewed old ties. A
Passion for Sicilians is more reportorial than some of Mangione’s other
works, though as always his presence is the glue of the disparate episodes.
He presents Dolci as a rounded, complex and controversial figure, rather than
as a “saint.” And as in his other accounts of Sicilian excursions, his book
is balanced on the majestic back of the island itself. “Mangione loves being
in Sicily,” said Robert Hatch in The
Nation. “You can sense him breathing the air” (Dec. 2, 1968: 602). Italian history and
the Italian-American connection furnish the subject of two works for “young
adults,” America is Also Italian
(1969) and Mussolini’s March on Rome
(1975). In 1972, with the publication of The
Dream and the Deal, a history of the Federal Writers Project, Mangione
returned in top form to his own life and Americanization. Within the
framework of a conventional history of that strange amalgam of scholarly
enterprise, political grab-bag and cardio-pulmonary resuscitation for starving
artists, Mangione wove a tale of broader import. One reviewer described the
Project as “a great crippled cross-eyed one-winged goony bird” (New York Times, Sept. 22, 1972).
Mangione showed that the bird not only flew, but soared, and, from the
heights, mapped out vast areas of American culture in all its wonderful
diversity. Mastering and ordering huge amounts of detail derived from
interviews and documents, he gave the sprawling story a soul. It is characteristic
of Mangione’s writings that the structure of the “nonfiction” work is almost
novelistic. It opens with a curtain-raising dinner at the White House in 1939
where Mangione, a guest of Mrs. Roosevelt, learns that the President will no
longer throw his weight behind the Project—a virtual guarantee of death. It
proceeds in flashback to introduce a doomed hero of sorts in the high-minded,
confused and persistent Project director, Henry Alsberg. Various political
villains snipe at him as they try to do in the undertaking or convert it to a
pork barrel. And a multitude of wonderfully-textured characters enter and
exit, drawn from the 6500 or so writers and local directors, whose ranks
included Communists, Communist-baiters, egocentrics, boosters, bigots,
cheats, hacks, frauds, cranks, drunkards, and womanizers, as well as some
very talented and dedicated people. There is a characteristically
multifaceted ending, for while the supporters of the Project were defeated in
Congress, its enduring accomplishments were recognized by astute critics like
Alfred Kazin, who called the state guides alone “an extraordinary American
epic” (Weisberger xi). Praise for The
Dream and the Deal was no less generous among reviewers. It was described
as “one of the best social histories of American writers in our time” in the Washington Post Book World, and was
nominated for the National Book Award in history in 1972. Mangione’s next
published book was An Ethnic At Large
(1978), subtitled “A Memoir of American in the Thirties and Forties.” It
retraces some of the ground covered in Mount
Allegro and The Dream and the Deal
but this time with the author fully and candidly in the center. This is the
major source of detailed information on Mangione’s education, literary
apprenticeship and personal development up to 1945. It ends on a symbolic
fadeout, which follows a discussion by Mangione of the prejudices that
burdened Italian immigrants and the conflicts that those negative images
burned into the souls of their American-reared children. “I resolved mine,”
he says, “by becoming an ethnic at large, with one foot in my Sicilian
heritage, the other in the American mainstream.” Then he tells of how he
heard the news of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, at a
Philadelphia Orchestra concert where his companion was a “piquant blue-eyed
brunette” from one of Virginia’s first families, who had told him that he was
the first Italian she ever dated. “Our tears mingled,” he recalls, “as the
orchestra commemorated the audience’s grief with a rendition of Beethoven’s Eroica” (Ethnic 369–70). Reviewers were uniform in finding the work an
evocative portrait not only of the author, but of the Depression and New Deal
eras. The Cleveland Plain Dealer
referred to Mangione as “a dreamer and a scholar, a writer and a teacher, a
literary critic and a socially involved participant in the left wing politics
of yesteryear,” whose “talent is large for poignant recollection” (June 18,
1978). The “foot planted in
his Sicilian heritage” is responsible for keeping Mangione busy in his later
years. Although he retired officially from the University of Pennsylvania in
1977 he launched and became the acting director (1978–80) of its Italian
Studies Center. He became similarly involved, through board memberships, in
the direction of the American Italian Historical Association, the American
Institute of Italian Studies and the America-Italy Society. And in 1981, he
started work on a major project, namely “to examine the Italian American
experience of the past one hundred years . . . [in] . . .
its historical, sociological, cultural, social and economic aspects.” The
result was La Storia: Five Centuries of
the Italian American Experience, a book, co-authored with Ben Morreale,
that encompasses all aspects of the great Italian migration to the United
States in much the same fashion that Irving Howe’s World of Our Fathers has done for East European Jewish
immigrants. Busily coordinating the vast research effort, Mangione
nonetheless found time for visiting professorships, lectures and readings at
many institutions, as well as for recreational travel. His slender form,
lively, expressive eyes, and brisk conversational and walking pace belie his
calendar age. Mangione’s numerous
honors and awards (in addition to the frequent reprinting of his major books)
include Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Fulbright, and National Endowment for the
Humanities research fellowships, as well as creative writing fellowships at
Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. In 1980 the University of Pennsylvania
conferred the degree of Litt.D. on him, and in 1987 he received a second
honorary Doctorate—this one in Humane Letters—from the State University of
New York at Brockport. He has received the decoration of Commendatore and Star of Italian Solidarity from the Italian
government, and in 1984 an Italian translation of Mount Allegro resulted in the Premio
Nazionale Empedocle, a prestigious Italian literary prize. He is also a
Fellow of the Society of American Historians. And in 1992 his life’s work was
celebrated by the Library of Congress. Yet for all his public
interpretive activities, Mangione remains faithful to the calling that first
possessed him as a child. “Writing,” he declared in a 1984 sketch for a
biographical reference volume, “continues to be my raison d’etre” (World Authors). And in an interview a
year earlier, he expressed his pleasure at Mount Allegro’s longevity with the comment: “To have it come back
. . . is very reassuring. The only real sense of gratification that
a writer has is that he’s written something that has value and will continue
to have value” (Philadelphia Inquirer,
May 7, 1983). Seven and a half decades after he was plunged into American
life as a strangers’ child on the streets of Rochester, Jerre Mangione has
ample cause to be gratified. Chicago |