Discipline: Literature

Jerre Mangione

Discipline: Literature
Region: Philadelphia, PA
MacDowell Fellowships: 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1964, 1967, 1971, 1974, 1975
Jerre Mangione was an American writer and scholar of the Sicilian-American experience. He was a graduate of Syracuse University and of the Federal Writers' Project. He was a professor of literature at the University of Pennsylvania from 1961 until his retirement in 1978. He became famous upon the publication of his first book, Mount Allegro, a novel about growing up in the Sicilian-American community of Rochester, New York. Mangione wrote Mount Allegro as a nonfiction memoir but changed it to a fiction book. Two decades after the book appeared, the city of Rochester officially renamed Mangione’s old neighborhood Mount Allegro, in tribute to his book. After publication of his final book, La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian-American Experience, Mangione was honored by the Library of Congress with an exhibition of his works and papers.