After Christ in Concrete Di Donato stopped being a bricklayer and was a writer for the rest of his life. He wrote three books, and many stories and sketches for magazines. In addition, he apparently left a lot of uncompleted and unpublished material at his death in 1991.
We don't know much about his life simply because there is no biography. None of his later books were commercially successful, and none of them has ever been reprinted. His short publications have never been collected. There is no complete bibliography, or list, of all his publications.
Here is the entry about Di Donato's life from the American National Biography Online. I haven't found anything longer than this.
Di Donato published one collection of some of his shorter pieces up to the end of the 1960s in 1970: Naked Author. The Collected Works of Pietro Di Donato (New York: Phaedra, 1970). These two short pieces are taken from it.
"I Killed Maria Goretti" is Di Donato's interview of Alessandro Serenelli, an old man of almost 90. As a young man of 20 at the turn of the century (1902) Serenelli had murdered a teenage girl, Maria Goretti, because she rejected his sexual advances. She was soon canonized ( made a saint) by the Roman Catholic Church. Di Donato wrote a book not about Goretti, but about Serenelli, The Penitant (1962).
You may want to read the Wikipedia article on Maria Goretti. If you do, be sure to read the short section about the "Controversy", and about Serenelli's imprisonment and repentance.
The second, "Mass for Unknown Soldiers", is a short piece about a man Di Donato met in a bar, and the story he told. It too has a theme of murder and repentance.
Each of these pieces, however, have other themes in them aside from the religious. Think about them, too!
There are a lot of fascinating themes in these two short pieces that occur throughout Di Donato's works, as early as Christ in Concrete.
Study these two pieces. Pick out three themes in one or both of them that are similar to themes in Christ in Concrete. Discuss similarities and differences between the way in which these themes are used in Christ in Concrete and the way in which the older Di Donato uses them in these works. It makes for a very interesting comparison!
Email to me and to your group. 300 - 400 words in length. Please put the word number on a separate line at the top of your assignment, like this: "380 words".
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NOTE: Please go here to download these pieces by FTP. Blackboard was not working when I had to upload them.