I'll Strike It Rich: A Novel of an Italian-American Family

[modest wear to book extremities; the jacket is a bit scuffed/rubbed on the front panel and the spine]. Vanity press novel about Timothy Salvati, who emigrates from Italy (Naples) in 1884 and struggles to find work in New York (existing "for five months by raiding garbage cans and living in a cellar") until he lands a job on a railroad-building crew. "Railroad jobs and unemployment alternate during the years that follow -- in the swamplands of Florida, in Maryland, through strikes and under slave-driving foremen -- until Timothy becomes a foreman himself, then meets and marries an American farm girl." More unemployment causes the couple to try farming back in Italy, but after two crop failures they return to America and settle in the Appalachian coal-mining town of Monongah, West Virginia. They never "strike it rich" in the way Timothy first envisioned, but their lives are ultimately fulfilled through the success of their children. According to their jacket biography, the D'Arianos, brother and sister, were immigrants themselves and were neighbors of the Salvati family in Monongah (where they still lived at the time their book was published). Scarce in commerce, it seems; an OCLC search turns up thirteen copies of the book in American libraries -- a higher-than-average number for a vanity press novel, but not so surprising when you consider that seven of those are located in West Virginia, and four of the remaining half-dozen in bordering states.

Product Info

Publisher: Exposition Press

Year: (c.1963)

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

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