When Thomas J. Ferraro declared Italian-American writing "one of the better kept literary secrets of the twentieth] century," he had in mind Garibaldi M. Lapolla, among other authors. In their detailed and sensitive treatment of everyday life in early twentieth-century Italian Harlem, Lapolla's three published novels - The Fire in the Flesh (1931), Miss Rollins in Love (1932), and The Grand Gennaro (1935) - form a cornerstone of early Italian-American...