A critical and annotated edition of Joseph Rocchietti's 1835 epistolary novel "Lorenzo and Oonalaska", currrently regarded as the earliest known Italian American novel. "Lorenzo and Oonalaska" offers compelling evidence that the history of Italian American literature is longer, and much more varied and complex than was previously believed. Before Rocchietti’s novel was rediscovered at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the prevailing view among scholars of the Italian diaspora in the United States was that the earliest examples of Italian American writing, in the period preceding the 1880-1920 mass immigration wave, came primarily in the form of letters, journals, travelogues, poetry, and autobiographies.
