Mari Tomasi

Mari Tomasi (1907–1965) was an American novelist who portrayed the lives of Italian immigrants in Vermont. Literature professor Thomas J. Ferraro calls her "the first significant Italian American woman novelist." Tomasi also worked as a journalist and local historian, and served a term in the Vermont House of Representatives.

Biography Early life and education Mari Tomasi was born on January 30, 1907, in Montpelier, Vermont, the third of five children of Bartolomeo and Margarita Tomasi. Her parents were immigrants from Turin in Northern Italy who owned a grocery and cigar store in Montpelier. Tomasi was born with a disability and walked with a limp; she was taken to Burlington, Vermont, as a child for corrective surgery, which was partially successful.

Originally aspiring to practice medicine, Tomasi attended Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and Trinity College in Burlington, Vermont, but left school to work as a journalist. Set in the Piedmont region of northern Italy, it depicts the tragic effect of fascist militarism on the life of two young peasants, Luigi and Nina. Tomasi had stayed in that part of Italy as a child while recovering from surgery, and had never forgotten the experience. The book received positive reviews from Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Mary Ellen Chase, and Faith Baldwin, among others.

Writing in 1975, critic Alfred F. Rosa was unimpressed with the novel, citing problems with structure and pacing and describing the ending as "contrived."

Works Deep Grow the Roots (1940) Like Lesser Gods (1949) Men Against Granite (2003) - published posthumously Vermont: Its Government (1947)