New York, Vesey Street, January 1922. The office of The Nation was heaped with the poems that had poured in at the end of the year, bundle on bundle.

Carl Van Doren, one of its editors, was wading through them. Every year at this season he wondered whether an annual poetry prize was worth an editor's trouble. So many poems, and so few poets! Then, without warning, a letter came into his hands.

"What I want is an outlet to express what I can say besides work," it said. "I am a worker, a pick and shovel man." And: "There are no words that can fitly represent my living sufferings." It ended in a cry: "Let me free! Let me free!"

Years later Van Doren wrote that if this was not an authentic cry, he had never heard one. It drowned out the noise of Vesey Street; it seemed to widen the walls of his cramped office.

The man who wrote it was Pascal D'Angelo, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. The day before, New Year's Day, he had eaten five cents' worth of decaying bananas and a loaf of stale bread. Twelve years earlier, when he first set foot in America, he could not speak English.

I. Leaving the Abruzzi

D'Angelo was born in 1894 in the Abruzzi highlands of central Italy, in a hamlet of a few stone houses outside the town of Introdacqua. The family slept in one narrow bed, and at night the goats and sheep were stabled below. He went to school at seven, off and on, stopped at twelve, and went into the fields. His parents worked other men's land for a small pittance; at fifteen he helped a neighbor with the harvest for two cents a day.

One evening that year he found his mother crying quietly at the window. At last she whispered that his father had decided to go away, to America. The year before, his father had rented two pieces of ground and worked them every hour of daylight; after selling the crop he had barely enough to pay the rent and the loan with its enormous interest. Now he sat on the doorstep in the evenings, looking out at the dark valley, saying less and less.

At first D'Angelo resented this America that was stealing his father. Then he grew curious. Then he wanted to go himself. His mother saw it. One night they sat on the steps without looking at each other. "You too—want to go away," she said. He did not answer; his head sank lower and lower. They wept in each other's arms. "I will return soon, we will return soon," he sobbed.

In the book he writes: "Her mother's fears foretold the truth. I never returned."

The day of departure was a Wednesday. The relatives made it a holiday and gave them a dinner as good as at his parents' wedding. At the station his mother tried to smile through her tears: "God bless you." On the train he went into his first tunnel and was so frightened he stopped sobbing; before Naples he saw the sea for the first time. Four days later they sailed on the Cedric, sleeping in iron berths in steerage.

On April 20, 1910, D'Angelo, sixteen, and his father were allowed to land in America. A foreman from their own town met them at the Battery. An elevated train thundered overhead; he waited for a car to fall, and none did, and the people in the street did not run. At the street corners he kept seeing "Ave.", and thought: how pious a place, to say its prayers at every crossing.

II. "I Have Been Handling Them Ever Since"

That same day they took a train to Hillsdale, where a state road was being built. A smoky wooden shack in the woods; a gang of men from home. Next morning he took up a pick and a shovel for the first time: "And we set to digging and handling our picks and shovels. And I have been handling them ever since."

At noon a man who had been in America a few years peeled something like an enormous pea pod and gave everyone a piece of the pulp. It was sweet. It was a banana.

He was made water boy, carrying pails to the men. For months no one in the gang thought of learning English; they learned the words the job needed, and "bread," "shirt," "gloves," "milk."

For four years he went from one job to the next, in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and everywhere it was pick and shovel. He wrote:

"Who hears the thuds of the pick and the jingling of the shovel? Only the stern-eyed foreman sees me. When night comes and we all quit work the thuds of the pick and the jingling of the shovel are heard no more. All my works are lost, lost forever. But if I write a good line of poetry—then when the night comes and I cease writing, my work is not lost. My line is still there. It can be read by you to-day and by another to-morrow. But my pick and shovel works cannot be read either by you to-day or by any one else to-morrow."

III. The One Who Stayed

Later, at a railroad job in West Virginia, a guy rope of a derrick snapped and the derrick came down, killing Teofilo and pinning Andrea, the "giant of Introdacqua." The men rushed to lift it; it slid again and crushed the last life out of him. The gang broke up. Back in New York his father said, "We are not better off than when we started," and asked whether he would go home with him.

D'Angelo shook his head. In this wonderful, perilous land where he had suffered so much, and would suffer more, he did not want to leave without really knowing it. He had a vague idea that somewhere in this vast country an opening existed, that somewhere he would "strike the light." His father could not understand. He went away, "a broken-hearted man."

Others from the gang went back to Italy or out west and were never heard of again. D'Angelo alone ended up in an old box car in the Erie Railroad yard in New Jersey, with the Palisades above him and New York across the Hudson. The pay was $1.13 a day. At night a shout of "All out! A wreck!" sent him off to carry wet ties and repair track.

In 1916 he heard that the state roads in northern New Jersey paid $2.25 a day and spent his last money on the fare. The foreman of the concrete gang, Domenick, cursed all day and had it in for him. In a rain, D'Angelo was pushing a heaped barrow of concrete up a steep, wet plank and said the load was too heavy. The foreman took the handles, slipped after a few steps, and stopped: "I'm the foreman. What do you think I have you here for?" D'Angelo had to push it up. His feet slipped, and a rusty nail went through his right hand.

The hand swelled. The foreman told him that if he could not use a shovel he should go home. That night the moon was bright, and on the road he came upon Domenick, apparently drunk. A fury he had never known rose in him. Then a hand lay on his shoulder, lightly. It was old Michele, also from the Abruzzi, who spoke fine Italian and talked of Dante, whom D'Angelo took for some ancient king. The old man heard him out and said: "Boy, a stupid world drove nails through other hands—other hands."

D'Angelo did not understand. Later, he writes, the image of that old man came to him sometimes like a frightful specter and sometimes like an alluring hope.

IV. English on the Wall

The contractor went bankrupt. The wages were gone, and so was his money; he made his way back to New York, borrowing fare on the way, and to the box car. Strangely, he felt lighter: "Foremen would shout at me, and I laughed as soon as their backs were turned."

A crowd of Mexican laborers came to the yard. One of them took a Spanish weekly from Texas and read it for hours. D'Angelo picked out words that looked like Italian, then moved on to English papers, one a week, taking them word by word. Each new word he learned he wrote in big letters on the moldy walls of the box car: "soon I had my first lesson in English all around me continually before my eyes."

One day a friend took him to an Italian vaudeville farce on the Bowery, and he thought he could do better. At home he began in Italian, could not manage it, and switched to English. A few Sundays produced three pages, which he showed to some brakemen; they laughed so hard he could not tell whether it was the jokes or the mangled English, and he gave himself the benefit of the doubt.

The jokes went around the yard; men brought him writing paper. Then one day he spent a quarter on a small Webster's dictionary, "second-hand, if not third," half torn. "But I thought I had gotten a treasure for the price. And I proceeded to memorize it."

It paid off at once. Some young brakemen, every morning before work, brought him hard words, hoping to see him made a fool of in front of the yard office. One day they gave him five words and he knew three. As they began to cheer, he said he would give them ten words in return. On the wall of the office with a pencil he wrote a long list that included "troglodyte," "helot," "ubiquity," "nadir," and, last, "asininity." "The defeat of these educated youths was, is and will be an eternal one," he wrote. After that, they nicknamed him "solution," and they became friends.

V. *Aida*, and Shelley

In the summer of 1919 he read in a newspaper that *Aida* would be given in the open air at the Sheepshead Bay race track. He did not know what *Aida* was; asking his way across Brooklyn, he pushed in to a seat next to the orchestra.

"And all at once I felt myself being driven toward a goal," he wrote. What he had been following by instinct was beauty. "The quality of beauty that is in 'Aïda' I have found only in the best of Shelley and perhaps Keats." Afterward, on the job, amid the roar of engines and the screams of wheels, those melodies would come to him, and he felt the urge to rush back to the box car and write another *Aida*, though he did not know one note from another, "as I still don't know."

He turned to words. He wrote many poems, for a girl he knew at a saloon and for a few fellow workers to read. One was "Song of Light," later printed in The Bookman:

"The sun robed with noons stands on the pulpit of heaven / Like an anchorite preaching his faith of light to listening space. / And I am one of the sun's lost words, / A ray that pierces through endless emptiness on emptiness / Seeking in vain to be freed of its burden of splendor."

There was a public library at Edgewater, and though his English was broken and his clothes ragged, he was received kindly. Browsing, he came upon Shelley's *Prometheus Unbound*, and saw in a flash a kinship between the climaxes of *Aida* and these luminous flights. Back in the box car he burned almost everything he had written: the jokes, the fragments, the humorous "poems."

He began to read poetry of every kind, and found that rhyme was not essential, and that a good deal of what goes under the name of poetry is trash.

VI. November 1919: No Turning Back

On a morning in November 1919 he made up his mind. "Saverio," he announced to a friend, "I am going to leave this place. I am going to live in the city and write poetry." "Pascal," said Saverio, "you will starve." "I shall."

He came to New York with a tumbledown valise. He took a room in the slums of the Brooklyn waterfront and for the first weeks wrote without stopping; the poems he sent out came back with a printed rejection slip.

He sent out poems twice more and twice more they came back. He understood that he was only "one of the millions of literary beggars." He found a job in a shipyard to forget poetry, and the winter passed into spring. In the summer of 1920 he read in a newspaper a poem he thought blatant trash, and flew into a rage: if such stuff could be printed, there was hope. He cut it out, pasted it on his door as a "horrible example," and quit his job the next day.

As the winter of 1921 approached he moved into a room that had been a chicken coop and woodshed, entered through a toilet shared by ten families, whose overflow ran under the door. There was no stove; the overcoat was his coat by day and his quilt by night. His daily food was stale bread and cold soup, about ten cents in all. On Saturdays he indulged in bananas, not at a cent each but twenty-five for a nickel, which meant nearly rotten. A vendor asked: "Are you buyin' this bananas for your dog?" "No," he said, "for my 'wolf.'"

He still went to the library. One day, with the pipes frozen and three days without washing, he went to the main library on Forty-second Street to wash his hands and his handkerchief. When he came back he found that someone had gone through the overcoat he had left on his chair and taken the last few pennies from the pocket. He could not pay the subway fare. He walked from Times Square, over the Manhattan Bridge, through sleet and rain, and stood shivering in the Long Island depot on Flatbush Avenue. He thought: "Was there a woman's brightening smile and a child's love-woven da! da! to greet me? What was there home for me? Only cold and overflows."

A little after two in the morning he opened the door and heard splashing. The window was open and snow was blowing in; the neighborhood children had opened it to look at his books and papers while he was out. The pipes had burst and the water had flowed under the bed and spoiled his bread. He huddled on the dry end of the bed and pressed his face against the quilt: "How long, O God, how long was this going to last?"

He woke at dawn with fever and a cough, the streets choked with snow. But the first thing he did was list every newspaper and magazine in New York, divide twenty poems into four parts, and visit several offices a day. "You will hear from us soon," some said; three or four weeks later the poems came back. An editor told him that the poems were chosen by "a special reader" and that he himself had never seen them. D'Angelo knocked on every door. "There was always the goading thought that if ninetynine offices rejected my poems the hundredth might accept them."

VII. The Letter After New Year's Day

At the end of 1921, as one of the last few hopes, he submitted three poems for The Nation's poetry prize. The year ended and no answer came. He wrote a letter to the editor, beginning "Dear Sir: I have submitted three poems 'For The Nation's Poetry Prize' within the established period …"

He was not asking for money. If the prize was going to be given away free anyway, he said, why not see that it went where it could help the most? "I am not coveting the prize because of the money. No! but because it will give me the recognition that I cannot do without … When I say that, they will listen to me—they will consider my works—they will begin to accept them." He wrote of his days: "For yesterday, New Year's Day, I only had five cents worth of decaying bananas and a loaf of stale bread to eat. And to-day: a half quart of milk and a stale loaf of bread." His landlady had told him to leave by January 10. "With a hundred dollars I can live five months." And he asked: "Let this prize (even if it is an honorary one) come like a bridge of light between me and my awaiting future."

Van Doren read it and soon arranged a meeting. D'Angelo came "with the mark of his hardships upon him. He must have been both cold and hungry at the time." But Van Doren found him full of "quiet patience," and "capable of gaiety." He accepted several of his poems, sent him to other editors, and wrote a short piece about him in The Nation's "Roving Critic" column. As for the prize itself, the book does not say whether he won it.

"The miracle happened," D'Angelo writes. The editors of two influential weekly publications became interested in his work; Henry Seidel Canby, editor of The Literary Review of the New York Evening Post, was one. Other magazines followed, the newspapers began to print his story, and word of him reached Europe. The literary world took him up as a great curiosity, and he was "literally feasted, welcomed and stared at." Dearer were the tributes of his fellow workers, who saw that "at last one of them had risen from the ditches and quicksands of toil to speak his heart to the upper world." Sweeter yet was the happiness of his parents, who learned that he had not gone astray.

According to Van Doren, this fame could have won D'Angelo any of several editorial positions, and he declined them all: "After paying so high a price to be a poet, he was not willing to take his reward in some meaner coin."

In November 1924 Macmillan published his autobiography, *Son of Italy*, with an introduction by Van Doren. He was thirty.

Afterword

He died in 1932 (to be verified).

In his book he said that the work of pick and shovel cannot be read, while a line of poetry stays. In his introduction, Van Doren wrote that no American, watching a gang of dark-skinned Italians busy in a ditch, could any longer help asking himself whether there was not some Pascal D'Angelo among them.

[SOURCES, VERSIONS, AND EDITORIAL LIMITS]

1. Scenes, dialogue and feelings come mainly from Pascal D'Angelo, *Son of Italy* (New York: Macmillan, published November 1924) and Carl Van Doren's introduction to it; no dialogue is invented. All of what his mother, father, fellow workers and editors say rests on his own account; no independent record has been found.

2. The opening follows Van Doren's introduction ("that day in January 1922"). The letter is printed in full in ch. XV; it says "yesterday, New Year's Day," so it was written about January 2, and the text says only "January 1922."

3. Age: the scan used here has lost the opening of ch. II, leaving only "20, 1894". The text says only "born in 1894," hence "twenty-seven or twenty-eight" in January 1922. His exact birth date is to be checked.

4. School, leaving school and work as a boy: ch. III. Landing on April 20, 1910, the ship Cedric: ch. V. The first job, Hillsdale: ch. VI; the book does not give the state. The derrick accident in West Virginia: ch. X; no year is given for the accident or his father's return, so the text says "later."

5. 1916, Domenick, the nail, and Michele: ch. XI; the bankruptcy and the loan of fare: ch. XI-XII. English, the dictionary and the brakemen: ch. XII; of the words he wrote on the wall, five are translated here.

6. *Aida*, Shelley and "Song of Light": ch. XIII-XIV. The book says "Song of Light" was "afterwards printed in The Bookman"; that issue has not been checked.

7. November 1919 and the years after: ch. XIV-XV. "Summer 1920" and "winter of 1921" are inferred from the book's wording. The night at the library and the walk home are undated; they come before the letter.

8. Whether D'Angelo won The Nation's prize is not stated in the book or in the introduction. The letter is addressed "To the Editor of The Nation."

9. "Brown Italians" is the 1924 wording; it is rendered here as "dark-skinned" and is not the view of this piece.

10. The Afterword says only that he died in 1932: no primary record of his last years or death (newspapers, death registration) has been read, and the year and circumstances are to be verified.

11. The piece ends around 1924; his later poems and the reviews of the book are outside its scope.

Sources: Pascal D'Angelo, *Son of Italy* (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1924), OCR text of the Internet Archive scan pascaldangeloson0000unse (sha256 96f4a9a47d45f301a07fa232298906388d7ea1447f54e43986f820673a020380), read November 3, 2026; page numbers in the scan are unreliable, so only chapters are cited; public domain in the US. Coordinates for Introdacqua, Ellis Island, Edgewater, New York and Brooklyn from Wikidata (Q50099, Q202175, Q178035, Q60, Q18419), area-level only and not used as historical evidence.