Italian American Writing Since World War II

Among the more vexing questions in my movie-besotted 1950's childhood was this one: in a movie made of my parents' life (supposing such a thing was possible) who would play my grandmother? Who, come to think of it, would play my parents, aunts and uncles, second cousins and all those vaguely related comare and compare? The question was made more vexing because of a paradox: it wasn't like I didn't see Italians in the movies, as well as in other forms of popular culture, all the time. "Volare" played, more or less continuously, and in two different versions, on the radio; It Started in Naples and a whole host of Let's-Go to-Italy-and-discover-passion movies were at the local cinema. But the Italians with whom Americans in the 1950s were enamoured were not