Writer, born in West Hoboken, New Jersey, USA. His father was killed on a construction site when he was 11, but he became a bricklayer. By 1937 he had turned to writing, and his semi-autobiographical novel, Christ in Concrete (1939), brought him instant fame. He continued to write fiction, mostly naturalistic portrayals of the hard lives of Italian working-class immigrants in the USA, such as Three Circles of Light (1960) and The Penitent (1962), but his later work never gained the attention of Christ in Concrete.
Pietro Di Donato (1911-1992) was an American writer born in West Hoboken, New Jersey (now Union City) to parents who emigrated from the region of Abruzzo in Italy.
Di Donato had limited formal education but reached great popularity with his first novel Christ in Concrete, which was published in 1939. The novel was inspired by the tragic death of Di Donato's father in a construction accident on Good Friday 1923.
Christ in Concrete was a blue-collar proletarian novel written by a proletarian. Screenwriter Ben Barzman, who wrote the screenplay into which the novel was directed, called it "the first of its kind," and The National Italian American Foundation called it "rare." The novel had originally been published as a short story by Esquire magazine but it was soon after expanded in a full novel.
The novel was adapted into the 1949 film Give Us This Day, written by Ben Barzman, and directed by blacklisted filmmaker Edward Dmytryk.
In 1942, Di Donato spent time in a Cooperstown, New York camp as a conscientious objector to World War II, during which he met former showgirl Helen Dean. His later novels did not attain the same level of attention as Christ in Concrete, though his 1960 novel Immigrant Saint: The Life of Mother Cabrini also became a classic.
Di Donato died of bone cancer in 1992 on Long Island, with his last work unpublished.
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