Of Migrants and Working Men: How Pietro Di Donato’s Christ in Concrete Travelled Between the US and Italy through Translation

Pietro di Donato’s 1939 novel Christ in Concrete 1 has been described as a “minor classic” unjustly “relegated to the margins of mainstream American culture” (Gardaphé 1993, ix). Yet the history of its production, its complex circulation and its multiple receptions tells a much more elaborate story, one which has implications for the construction of national, hyphenated and transnational literatures, as well as for our understanding of the connection between these models and the history of mobility, both social and geographic-that is to say, with the history of class and with that of migration.