The Collected Works, Volume One: Prose, Selected Letters

by Emanuel Carnevali

How can it be. The miracles, have they come to this. It rains, I am one can’t distantiate himself from the tangle of the rain. There is no more another day in me. The miracles, when I was born, when I worked, when I loved the miracles, what has been done with them. Not I, not I, I was earnest, I believed, who has thrown away the miracles. Throw them away, throw everything away.
—"Suffocation", previously unpublished

“He is of the sun treader tribe, also a walker in dark shadows. He seemed sometimes to be throwing himself at the sun. He wrote wildly in shreds and splinters at times; he must write because he was a writer…” —Carl Sandburg

Emanuel Carnevali arrived in New York City in 1914 at the age of 16, knowing English only from pulp novels and scraps of conversation. By 1918, he began to be published widely in magazines like Poetry, The Little Review, and The Dial, and had ingratiated himself with the leading American poets of the day, including William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Lola Ridge, and Max Bodenheim. But Carnevali's early literary success was short-lived, as chronic health issues and his inability to hold steady work forced him to return to Italy in 1921, where he lived in various inns, clinics, and hospitals for the remainder of his life. His only book, A Hurried Man, was published in 1925 by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions, and his Autobiography, edited by Kay Boyle from his extant writings and her correspondence with Carnevali, was published in 1967. This two-volume set brings together for the first time all of Carnevali's published works, as well as a trove of unpublished materials taken from his notebooks, correspondence, and other archives. This collection brings to the fore an unsung modernist, a fearless writer and poet whose frankness and outsider’s vantage designate him as an heir to Walt Whitman.

Volume One includes Carnevali's short stories, prose sketches, and his autobiographical novel The First God, which follows the edits Maria Pia Carnevali—the writer's stepsister—made to Boyle’s volume, as well as a generous selection of letters, including his earliest missives to Poetry editor Harriet Monroe, to his final pleading letters to Ezra Pound, who was one of many writers and patrons who supported Carnevali during his final years.

Emanuel Carnevali (December 4, 1897–January 11, 1942) was an Italian American writer. His body of work includes poetry, literary criticism, autobiography, and other prose writings. He was a friend and correspondent of many important figures of literary modernism in the United States, including Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Kay Boyle, Lola Ridge, Robert McAlmon, and Ernest Walsh.

426 pages, Paperback

Published November 29, 2022

About the author

Emanuel Carnevali, “The Black Poet” as William Carlos William once said, born in 1897, Florence, Italy. He immigrated to the U.S. just before World War I at the age of 16 and lived in the streets of New York where he held a series of menial jobs and learned the english language through the street advertising. He later moved to Chicago where he met and attended illustrious american poets like Ezra Pound, Williams Carlos Williams and Sherwood Anderson.

When writing the novel The First God (il primo dio), he portrayed his life and relationship with the United States transforming America almost into a character.

In his poetry and prose, Carnevali prized immediacy of expression and vivid depictions of suffering. In 1919, Harriet Monroe invited Carnevali to become associate editor of Poetry, a position he held for six months. While in Chicago, he became seriously ill with encephalitis lethargica, a disease that caused him to shake uncontrollably. He was hospitalized and eventually returned to Italy, where he kept up correspondences with Williams and Boyle until his death in 1942 in a mental asylum.

Carnevali’s collections frequently include selections from his poetry, prose, and criticism. A Hurried Man (1925) was the only volume published during his lifetime; posthumous collections include The Autobiography of Emanuel Carnevali (1967), which was compiled and introduced by Kay Boyle, Fireflies (1970), and Furnished Rooms (2006).