The Grand Gennaro

London: Jarrolds Publishers. Good in Fair dj. 1936. First British Edition. Hardcover. [moderately shelfworn, front board somewhat bowed, soiling to edges of text block; the jacket is heavily edgeworn and soiled, with some paper loss at the front hinge, chipping along the top edge, and a ragged horizonal tear in the front panel, crudely tape-repaired on the verso]. An acknowledged classic of Italian-American literature, and extremely scarce in both its original U.S. and British editions. Like the author's two previous two novels, "Fire in the Flesh" (1931) and "Miss Rollins in Love" (1932), the present work takes place around the turn of the twentieth century in East Harlem, at that time the largest Italian settlement in America. It centers around the title character, an ambitious man who has left his family behind in Italy in order to get rich in America; through "guile and treachery and courage," including taking over the business of an old friend by force, he achieves success as "the rag king of Harlem's Little Italy," but after he (finally) brings his wife and children over from the Old Country, his life starts to unravel. Per the finding aid for the Lapolla Papers, held in the Balch Institute collections at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Lapolla "was one of the first Italian-American authors to describe the experience of acculturation and the struggle between native Italian culture and the process of Americanization." A native of the southern Italian town of Rapolla, he immigrated with his family to the U.S. in 1890, was educated in the New York City public school system and went on to study at Columbia University, from which he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1910 and a Master of Arts degree in secondary education in 1912. He enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War I, and after the war entered his chosen profession: teaching. He taught various English-related subects in the New York City schools for more than thirty years, and in addition to his teaching duties held a number of administrative jobs (the longest being as Principal of P.S. 174 in Brooklyn from 1935 until his death in 1954); he also taught additional classes at Hunter College and CUNY, and was involved in many professional organizations. In addition to his three novels, he wrote several books for classroom use, plus plays, short stories, poetry, and two cookbooks -- and in his spare time (what?!) he indulged a passion for art, creating pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches, and watercolors. . (Inventory #: 24700)