A vociferous supporter of the rightful inclusion of Italian American writers within the ever-growing and diverse American literary canon,11 Barolini in 1985 published the award-winning The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian-American Women. In her pathblazing introduction, she makes a brilliant and forceful argument on behalf of Italian American women’s literature, and of all literature that is informed by the experiences of gendered culture:

The Italian American woman writer . . . is stranded in a no-woman’s-land where there is small choice; either follow the omnipresent models that do not speak to her own particular experience, or write of her experience and know that it will be treated as of no importance, too “different” for critical attention. Alice Walker asked the right question: why should anyone require more of a reason for the existence of Sula (or Rosa) than for Jane Eyre? (31)12

What Barolini would experience in the years to come, despite the praise that both The Dream Book and Umbertina received from readers such as Tillie Olsen, Cynthia Ozick, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker, indicated that the obstacles facing the emergence of Italian American women’s literature would not be overcome easily. In 1997, just prior to the publication of Chiaroscuro, all of Barolini’s books were out of print: the pioneer of Italian American women’s literature was virtually absent from the contemporary literary arena, her books unavailable and thus doomed to remain unknown to younger readers as well as to a larger, non-Italian American reading audience. Although this is the sad plight of far too many books, it is especially pernicious in the case of an author such as Barolini who, in naming and bringing to the attention of readers Italian American women’s literature, has been its courageous midwife. In the twentieth year after its original publication, this reprint of Umbertina acknowledges the place of its author and of Italian American women writers in American literature.

Helen Barolini was born in 1925 in Syracuse, New York, into a second-generation, middle-class Italian American family: her mother’s parents had come from Calabria, while her father’s were from Sicily. After attending Wells College and Syracuse University, where she majored in English, Barolini traveled to Italy in 1948. There she met and married the Venetian poet Antonio Barolini, with whom she had three daughters. The family lived in both Italy and the United States, and following her husband’s death, Barolini moved back permanently to the United States in 1973. Her bicultural experience shapes her first novel as well as the body of work she has produced in the last three decades: a book of poems she co-authored with her husband entitled Duet (1966), The Dream Book (1985), the novel Love in the Middle Ages (1986), Festa: Recipes and Recollections of Italian Holidays (1988), a book on the fifteenth-century Italian scholar-publisher Aldus Manutius entitled Aldus and His Dream Book (1991), Chiaroscuro (1997), a radio drama on Margaret Fuller, myriad essays, stories and poetry published in periodicals and anthologies, and many translations from Italian to English.