Giving voice to the hardworking Italian immigrants who worked, lived, and died in New York City shortly before the Great Depression, this American classic ranks with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as one of the 20th century’s great works of social protest.
Largely autobiographical, Christ in Concrete opens with the dramatic Good Friday collapse of a building under construction, crucifying in concrete an Italian construction worker, whose death leaves his pregnant wife and eight children impoverished. His oldest son, Paul, at just twelve years old, must take over his father’s role—and his job.
Paul’s odyssey into manhood begins on the high girders where death is an occupational hazard and a boy’s dreams are the first fatality. Written in sonorous prose that recalls the speaker’s Italian origins, Pietro di Donato’s Christ in Concrete is at once a powerful social document and a deeply moving story about the American immigrant experience.