Growing up an Italian-American in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of New York city, Marianna De Marco longed for college, culture, and upward mobility. Her daydreams circled around WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) heroes on television—like Robin Hood and the Cartwright family—but in Brooklyn she never encountered any. So she associated moving up with Ocean Parkway, a street that divides the working-class Italian neighborhood where she was born from the middle-class Jewish neighborhood into which she married. This book is Torgovnick's unflinching account of crossing cultural boundaries in American life, of what it means to be an Italian American woman who became a scholar and literary critic. Included are autobiographical moments interwoven with engrossing interpretations of American cultural icons from Dr. Dolittle to Lionel Trilling, The Godfather to Camille Paglia. Her experiences allow her to probe the cultural tensions in America caused by competing ideas of individuality and community, upward mobility and ethnic loyalty, acquisitiveness and spirituality. Born and raised in the Italian American enclave of Bensonhurst in Brooklyn, New York, Marianna De Marco Torgovnick left the neighborhood to attend prestigious colleges, eventually becoming an English professor at Duke University in North Carolina. Writing at such a distance from Bensonhurst, De Marco Torgovnick, in this collection of essays, touches upon issues of ethnicity and class, prejudice and exclusion, and does it all with insight, irony, and frequent flashes of humor. Her essays concerning her family, and especially her experience of giving birth to a child with a congenital heart defect, are very personal and touching, and her analysis of cultural trends and works of literature, including a startling look at the classic pop novel, The Godfather , are insightful. Marianna De Marco Torgovnick , professor of English at Duke University, is author of the acclaimed Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives , also published by the University of Chicago Press.