American Dream: An Immigrant's Quest

Brought to this country from Tuscany at age 10 in 1913, Pellegrini has had a successful career as a professor of English and as a writer on both the immigrant experience and gourmet cooking. However, in this autobiography he concentrates on the development of his political thinking, providing an apologia for his brief and disillusioning membership in the Communist Party. He argues convincingly that most intellectuals who joined the party in the 1930s were not revolutionaries, but idealists, and shows how his studies in political science influenced him by revealing a pattern of unfair protection of the propertied classes from Alexander Hamilton and Chief Justice John Marshall to the Great Depression. The chapters on the growing awareness in an immigrant of the advantages of democracy are especially striking, although on occasion Pellegrini's writing tends toward the stuffy and pedantic. (May 15)