Lorenzo and Oonalaska

Currently regarded as the earliest Italian American novel, Joseph Rocchietti's Lorenzo and Oonalaska, published in 1835, offers compelling evidence that the history of Italian American literature is longer, and much more varied and complex than was previously believed. Before 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, travelogues, poetry, and autobiographies. The origins of Italian American fiction were commonly believed to date back to the publication, in 1885, of Luigi Donato Ventura's novella Peppino, probably written in Italian and almost immediately translated into French and English.