Pietro di Donato's novel Christ in Concrete, published to wide critical acclaim in 1939, evolved from a short story published in Esquire magazine. The novel was recognized as a classic of so-called "proletarian literature." The book tells the story of first-generation Italian immigrants in America, and is as evocative and powerful a work as Call It Sleep (1934), Henry Roth's novel about the Jewish immigrant experience. A Book of the Month Club success, the novel made di Donato (l911-1992) relatively rich and famous at 28.

The language of Christ in Concrete has the quality of prose poetry: "The toilet above flushed with watery roar, pish-thrash-gargled down the exposed pipe and trick-trickled away in its hollow metal throat." Paul, the protagonist of the work, emerges from the subway one morning and sees "life (standing) out in pulsing sunlight photography. Morning-born senses brought vividly the solarized city into ken. Sharp against sky's light-light blue concave stood the architectural stance of buildings..." A stream-of-consciousness narrative technique is suffused with poetic imagery: descriptions of "Job" and "Tenement" carry an hallucinatory aura, a quality possessed by the best poetry. Di Donato's prose marches, indomitable; rushes, breathless in a tone of repressed hysteria — unpunctuated words strung side-by-side like the bricks laid by the work's bricklaying paesanos.

Autobiographic elements from its author's life are obvious in the novel. Di Donato grew up in West Hoboken, New Jersey, among Italians who emigrated from the region of Abruzzo in Italy. His father, a bricklayer, died (like Pietro's character Geremio) in an accident on a construction site on Good Friday. Pietro, like the Paul of the novel (son of Geremio) became a bricklayer at age 12, after his father's tragic death (in 1923).

The sudden rise in fortune after publication of his novel was too much, it seems, for di Donato to cope with. Like other American literary phenomena (Jack Kerouac, Joseph Heller, etc.) di Donato was destined to be a one-book author. Following his great success, he lapsed into a twenty-year silence. His long awaited 2^nd novel, This Woman (1958), did not fulfill the promise shown in the earlier work. This Woman starts strongly with poetic descriptive phraseology but bogs down in turgid prose full of pseudo-Joycean monologues and turns embarrassingly bad, barely readable — more an exercise in self-abuse than self-revelation.

After a critical lambasting, di Donato turned back to the childhood scene he had used as background to his classic work. His next novel, Three Circles of Light (1960), is an idealized version of a childhood lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, among the laboring Italian immigrants at turn of the 20^th century. Though more readable than the previous novel, the 3^rd novel is a work of bathos, sentimental — the language minus the poetry of the l^st novel — like something William Saroyan might have written while nursing a hangover.

Although he continued to write, di Donato disappeared from view, his status as serious fiction-writer, as artist, compromised by his Saturday Evening Post-cover version of his Hoboken childhood. In later years he wrote two nonfiction works (biographies of saints), journalism published in Penthouse magazine, fiction published in Playboy magazine--work that wavers between the sacred and the profane. A last work, said to be a postmodern effort, and titled The American Gospels, completed in his last years, remains unpublished.

Facts of di Donato's life are not popularly known. At age 16 he joined the Communist Party. His Communism, however, was highly idiosyncratic and his later written work, with its theological concerns, proved problematic when viewed from a Marxist perspective. During World War II, di Donato turned conscientious objector and was interned for the duration in a camp in Cooperstown, New York. During the war period he met Helen Dean, an ex-showgirl, whom he married and had two sons with. The family lived on Long Island.

Despite the decline in quality of di Donato's novels, Christ in Concrete continued to be read and highly regarded. The language of the novel is striking due to its author's fidelity to the vernacular speech of his Italian-American characters, also for the poetic prose style. Di Donato's characters don't speak broken English; they speak Italian-American, a hybrid concoction. Rendering the idiomatic speech of l^st generation Italian immigrants — "somebodys whose gotta buncha keeds," says Mike the barrel-mouth, "and he alla times talka from somebodys elsa!" — was something different to literature in 1939. The novel was as innovative, in its use of "common" language, as Hamlin Garland's Main-Traveled Roads (1891), a pivotal work of American realism because of Garland's rendition of the vernacular speech of the American Mid-West, speech pretty much hitherto excluded, in its idiomatic form, from American literature.

In addition to his innovative approach in rendering the immigrant experience, di Donato supplied his novel with a mythic substructure. The father is a Christ-like figure, crucified by "great God Job"; Paul in the role of the Apostle Paul serves as mouthpiece for di Donato in creating a new theology, placing the mother in its center, inviolate, the matriarchy supplanting the patriarchal Catholic Church which is indifferent, in the novel, to the plight of the poor immigrants, and insufficiently responsive to the seven hungry children of Annunziata, Paul's mother, left widowed by the untimely death of husband Geremio. Di Donato's theology, as illustrated in Christ In Concrete, includes a rejection of Christ as savior in favor of "man," the new god, who must save himself. Paul as alter ego figure proselytizes for a new, or revived, paganism which makes an idol of "woman," primary among whom is "mother," the foundation of "family," the safe harbor, unlike corrupt "church" and "state" (represented in the novel by "Mr. Murdin," foreman of Job).

Christ in Concrete has been called a work of social protest, proletarian manifesto, genius work of primitivism, modern Greek tragedy, and the prototypical Italian-American novel. I call it "literature."