The writer Giuseppe Prezzolini said that Italian immigrants left behind tears and sweat but not "words," making their lives in America mostly in silence, their memories private and stories untold.
In this innovative portrait of the Italian-American experience, these lives are no longer hidden. Ilaria Serra offers the first comprehensive study of a largely ignored legacy—the autobiographies written by immigrants.
Here she looks closely at fifty-eight representative works written during the high tide of Italian migration.
Scouring archives, discovering diaries, and memoirs in private houses and forgotten drawers, Serra recovers the voices of the first generation—bootblacks and poets, film directors and farmers, miners, anarchists, and
seamstresses—compelled to tell their stories. Mostly unpublished, often thickly accented, these tales of ordinary men and women are explored in nuanced detail, organized to reflect how they illuminate the realities of
work, survival, identity, and change.
Moving between history and literature, Serra presents each as the imaginative record of a self in the making and the collective story of the journey to selfhood that is the heart of the immigrant experience.

"Analyzes 58 immigrant memoirs that date from the late 19th to the mid-20th centuries and range in settings from city slums to frontier towns." -The Chronicle of Higher Education "Serra offers the first comprehensive study of the largely ignored legacy of immigrant autobiographies..." -Italian America "Of great interest to students and scholars of Italian-American studies, life-writing, ethnic and immigration studies, and multicultural studies." -- -William Boelhower, Louisiana State University author of Through a Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature "Such a book is important to encourage representatives of the many newer immigrant groups to be stewards of their own group's autobiographical expressions." -Biography "The Value of Worthless Lives makes the reader care about ordinary and extraordinary men and women, workers, poetic natures, and spiritual seekers who lived through the trauma of migration and made efforts to pass their experiences on in autobiographical narratives." -- -Werner Sollors, Harvard University author of Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture "Serra's exploration of previously ignored works provides us with a new dimension of the Italian American experience ...she has uncovered a lost treasure." -- --Fred Gardaphe, Stony Brook University (accent over e /" author of From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities "A trailblazing study of immigrant autobiographies...a wide-ranging, original, and precious contribution to ethnic and cultural studies bridging two worlds." -- -John Paul Russo, University of Miami author of The Future Without A Past: The Humanities In A Technological Society

Ilaria Serra is associate professor of Italian and comparative studies at Florida Atlantic University. Her research spans from Italian cinema and literature to the history of Italian immigration to the United States. She is the author of Immagini di un immaginario: L'emigrazione italiana negli Stati Uniti fra i due secoli: 1890– 1925 (1997); The Value of Worthless Lives: Writing Italian American Immigrant Autobiographies (2007); and The Imagined Immigrant: Images of Italian Emigration to the United States between 1890 and 1924 (2009).