The Paesanos

[light shelfwear, a bit of dust-soiling to the top edge of the text block, one-time owner's signature on front endpaper (see Notes); the jacket is heavily browned along the spine, somewhat less so along the edges of both the front and rear panels]. The first of two novels by this Colorado-born author, based on his own Italian immigrant family (fictionalized as the Simones and the Maccaluccis). Pagano was better-known (and more prolific) as a screenwriter than as a novelist, with sixteen feature films and several dozen TV series episodes to his credit between 1938 and 1969, over which time he published just three novels. (The sequel to this book was "Golden Wedding," published in 1943; his third book was "The Condemned," which appeared in 1947.) His parents had initially lived in several coal-mining communities in Colorado (the setting for this novel and parts of "Golden Wedding") before settling in Denver, where Jo was born in 1906. An early interest in art and writing led him to the West Coast, where he began to publish (and illustrate) short fiction about 1933; he got his first serious attention when his early short story, "The Disinherited" (not to be confused with the Jack Conroy novel of the same name), published in the November 1933 issue of Scribner's Magazine, was selected for inclusion in a 1934 anthology entitled "Editor's Choice." (A 1951 reference book entry on Pagano states that the story, "about the effect of the depression on homeless boys, was filmed by Hollywood," but this isn't exactly what one might assume: rather than being adapted for any kind of studio production, the story served as the basis for a 16mm "home movie" adaptation made by actor Lew Ayres. As reported in a 1935 UP story: "Lew had built the sets, assembled the cast, drew the titles, filmed and directed the picture and scored it with records. It was so well done that [Nat] Levine signed Lew to a long-term director's contract, which specifies Lew is not to act." Ayres, however, did continue to act, and there is no record of him ever having directed anything, so you can make of that news item whatever you will.) This copy bears the ownership signature of novelist and poet Sanora Babb, who, like Pagano, spent a good deal of her childhood in Colorado before making her way to California, where she worked as a journalist and eventually met and married the famed Chinese-American cinematographer James Wong Howe.

Product Info

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Year: 1940

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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