The Wine of Youth
About this ebook
"A group of sketches, rather than short stories, by the author of Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Fante to me captures the lusty, violent, warmhearted, passionate spirit of his Italian-American compatriots far better than any writer. There's none of the turgidity, the sensationalism, the "instinctual grunts" of di Donato. Here is one family, almost certainly Fante's -- the arrogant, swaggering male father; the worn gentle mother who cries about everything concerning God and her children; and the boys, good-bad roughnecks at the parochial school, at communion, at home. And underneath it all one senses Fante's deep affection, which includes a certain humorous tolerance, for these simple, fervent, hot-tempered people." -Kirkus Reviews
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About the author
John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also include The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust. A prolific screenwriter, he was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published Dreams from Bunker Hill, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.
