Christ in Concrete - by Pietro Di Donato (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Christ in Concrete

"Written in white-hot passion."--The New Yorker

"Robust and full-blooded and passionate, now and then almost to the point of craziness...[di Donato] has imagination and a healthy sense of poetry...sometimes one feels as though bricks and stones and trowelfuls of mortar have been thrown onto the pages and from them have arisen words."--Saturday Review

About the Author

Pietro di Donato was born on April 3, 1911, in West Hoboken, New Jersey. When his bricklayer father, Geremio, died in a building collapse in 1923, Pietro left school to support his family as a construction worker. Though he had little formal education, Donato loved French and Russian novels, and took night classes at the city college in construction and engineering. Inspired by the works of Émile Zola, he decided to begin writing about his experiences in the Italian American community. In 1937 the first version of Christ in Concrete--a chronicle of his father's life--was published in Esquire. It was then expanded into a novel and became a bestseller. Donato wrote five more books in his lifetime. He died in 1992.

Studs Terkel (1912-2008) grew up in Chicago. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932 and from the University of Chicago Law School in 1934. He acted in radio soap operas, worked as a disk jockey, a radio commentator, and a TV emcee, and traveled all over the world doing on-the-spot interviews. He also had a daily radio program on WFMT in Chicago that was syndicated throughout the country. He was the author of American Dreams: Lost and Found; Working; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression; Division Street: America Giants of Jazz; and Talking to Myself.