Surface Roots (Prose Series66)

Kenneth Scambray’s first collection of short stories, set in Southern California, the Central Coast, and the San Joaquin Valley, depict that expansive California landscape also found in John Fante’s fiction. In Scambray’s stories, California’s history and Italian Americans are inextricably intertwined. California is a place of settlement, struggle, and success for Italian Americans. While some of his protagonists must fight for survival, others begin that typical Ameri-can quest for identity in a modern world. As the final story set in nineteenth-century Italy suggests, the political and social origins of California’s Italian Americans, like nearly all Italian-American descendants of the Great Migration, are rooted in their forebears’ earlier historic struggle for survival and identity.