Jerre Mangione, 4th Annual ODU Literary Festival

Like everyone else, writers needed to eat during the Depression, and the federal government put more than six thousand of them to work in what W.H. Auden called one of the noblest and most absurd undertakings ever attempted by any state. Jerre Mangione, former national coordinating editor of the Federal Writers\u27 Project (1935- 1943), will tell the story of this exciting and controversial branch of the WPA and relate it to the current economic conditions facing today\u27s creative writers. Mangione is the author of ten books of fiction and non-fiction, including the best-selling memoirs Mount Allegro and An Ethnic at Large. His Wednesday afternoon talk comes from his book The Dream and the Deal, hailed by Alfred Kazin as one of the best social histories of American writers in our time

Why the hyphen? Individual and collective memories of Italianness in the United States at the intersection of class and generation

This three-generation oral history study offers insight into why descendants of Italian migrants to the United States still choose hyphenated identities today. The research project shows how the meaning of Italianness shifts among the interviewees depending on class affiliation: among the middle-class offspring the use of the hyphen can be understood mainly as a reaction to the experienced pressure to give in to Anglo conformity. Among the blue-collar, urban progeny, Italianness expresses itself as a combination of an experienced ethnic environment on the one hand and a symbolic ethnicity on the other