To understand Pietro di Donato and his literary career, we musk ask why, despite the drop-off in artistic quality, did di Donato disappear so quickly from the literary scene after creating a masterpiece such as Christ in Concrete?

Christ in Concrete has powerful and diverse dialogue and narration. Although difficult to read at first for its unique writing style, the novel is truly an experiment in the Italian American fictional experience. Di Donato, with his novel Christ in Concrete, uses dialogue and narration in such a way as to accurately portray the Italian American experience while reciting an intriguing tale at the same time.

His dialogue in Christ in Concrete accurately portrays the difficulties, as well as the splendor, of the Italian-American language: sometimes it is native Italian, sometimes a broken English, and sometimes Italian translated directly to English. He shows us a desperation dialogue used when characters slip into a religious fervor. He also demonstrates the importance and sacredness of certain Italian words such as "Dio" by refusing to translate it to the American "God," believing it loses meaning in the translation.

With his prose, di Donato successfully narrates a tale of an Italian-American boy whose search for the American Dream is crushed. He does not spare the objective facts in Christ in Concrete. What makes the novel so important as a work of fictive art is his ability to tell the story with feeling. Di Donato accomplishes that with third-person to first-person point-of-view jumps of the protagonist, long flowing paragraphs as well as short, quick fragments, and many other devices which make Christ in Concrete, as di Donato put it and as mentioned before, "the easiest thing that I ever wrote and the best thing I ever wrote" (Diomede 102).

When we ask why di Donato disappeared from the literary world after Christ in Concrete, we must realize the obvious. Di Donato never became a prominent figure on the American literary culture scene. After Christ in Concrete, he did not publish again until nineteen years later. Then in 1958, he published This Woman. It was received with harsh reviews, and so di Donato's talents as a writer were deemed limited. He slipped into the realm of the forgotten author. Yet, we must understand both of these novels -Christ in Concrete and This Woman-to fully realize what it was that vanquished di Donato in his search for critical acclaim. Christ in Concrete was a very experimental book for its time; both in terms of style and content. Di Donato told the story of urban labor workers, and he spared no gruesome details of their dying during the accident. This raw honesty actually got him his first step in the door. The first chapter of the novel, which was initially the short story published in Esquire, tells of the immigrant laborers with candor. Di Donato's writing style was also important. He introduced a dialogue which conveyed that of the Italian American at the time, and how it compared and contrasted with standard American idiom. Nineteen years later, when di Donato published This Woman, his candidly sexual prose made the novel even more risky. Instead of writing about the difficulties of living in Hoboken, NJ, he told the story of a man who beats his wife during sex to vent his sadistic obsessions. With its explicit and graphic material, the content was unsuitable for most audiences at the time. His style was much like that in Christ in Concrete, lined with stream-of-consciousness prose. Then, when Three Circles of Light was published two years later, di Donato had virtually been forgotten. For this reason, the novel would have had to reach the artistic power equal to or beyond that of Christ in Concrete if it was to receive any attention. Since it did not do this, the book generated little discussion and interest.

With Christ in Concrete, Pietro di Donato managed to represent an accurate portrayal of Italian American life with a unique style of prose. With the publication of This Woman in 1958, he continued with experimental prose but forgot to include a solid plot line. Two years later, when he published Three Circles of Light, he made the prose entirely standard, almost turning it into a memoir. He backed off from the experimentation he used so beautifully in Christ in Concrete and This Woman when he created Three Circles of Light, thus taking away from its power as a book of artistic fiction. Redeeming this lack of fictive creativeness in Three Circles of Light was di Donato's accurate rendering of Hoboken, NJ, during the early 20th century. Yet by this time, di Donato was forgotten and Three Circles of Light was virtually ignored.

To realize This Woman and Three Circles of Light as important works in Italian American fiction, such as many have claimed about Christ in Concrete, is to realize Pietro di Donato as an important Italian American author, and thus an important American author. In the midst of a literary canon reformation, it is crucial that the Italian American author is not left out. Their experiences as Italian Americans are just as American as any other, and to exclude them would be to cause students of literature to be missing out on a part of what it means to be American. The United States was built on its cultural diversity, and is now considered the world's melting pot. As a country, we celebrate our cultural diversity. Therefore, we need desperately to include Italian American authors in the general American literary canon. What transforms Pietro di Donato from an Italian American author to an important American author is his accurate depiction of Italian American life in the early 20th century-a life experienced by many-as well as his unique writing style using both prose and dialogue.