Lorenzo and Oonalaska

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Currently regarded as the earliest Italian American novel, Joseph Rocchietti’s Lorenzo and Oonalaska, pub-lished in 1835, offers compelling evidence that the history of Italian American literature is longer, and much more varied and complex than was previously believed. Be-fore Rocchietti’s novel was rediscovered at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the prevailing view among scholars of the Italian diaspora in the United States was that the earliest examples of Italian American writing, in the period preceding the 1880-1920 mass immigration wave, came primarily in the form of letters, journals, trav-elogues, poetry, and autobiographies. The origins of Ital-ian American fiction were commonly believed to date back to the publication, in 1885, of Luigi Donato Ven-tura’s novella Peppino, probably written in Italian and al-most immediately translated into French and English.