Julia Savarese
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Julia Savarese (born 1926) is an American writer. She was born in New York City.[1] After graduating summa cum laude from Hunter College in 1950, she worked as an editor for various publications.[2] Her novels include The Weak and the Strong (1952), which tells the story of an Italian-American family living in New York during the Great Depression, and Final Proof (1971), a novel about the death of a publishing empire.[3] She published several plays and received a Ford Foundation grant for playwriting. She also wrote for television, and in 1968 received the Hallmark Television Award.[2]
The Weak and the Strong was one of the earliest novels about growing up as the daughter of Italian immigrants; it defied the stereotypes of "happy-go-lucky" Italian family life.[4] When it was first published, critics called it "bleak," "unrelenting," and "humorless." In The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (1985), Helen Barolini suggests that this was largely due to critics' expectations of Italian-American writers, and of women in particular; for a male writer such as Pietro di Donato, or an established woman writer such as Flannery O'Connor, she writes, "that kind of unsentimentality would be verismo of the highest order."[2] In 1974, Savarese was one of the few women included in Rose Basile Green's pioneering study of Italian-American writers.[1]