Wait Until Spring, Bandini

by John Fante

Overview

He came along, kicking the snow. Here was a disgusted man. His name was Svevo Bandini, and he lived three blocks down that street. He was cold and there were holes in his shoes. That morning he had patched the holes on the inside with pieces of cardboard from a macaroni box. The macaroni in that box was not paid for. He had thought of that as he placed the cardboard inside his shoes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062013170
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	05/25/2010
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	437 KB

About the Author

John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also include The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust. A prolific screenwriter, he was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published Dreams from Bunker Hill, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.

Editorial Reviews

Edward M. White, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, described Wait until Spring, Bandini as "an affecting and unified book portraying the painful family situation of Arturo Bandini, a young adolescent obviously modeled after the author." Mangan believed that Wait until Spring, Bandini was "a lucid and strikingly unsentimental account of a close-knit family struggling, against the odds, to survive hard times with dignity; and its most impressive achievement is the central portrait of [Bandini's] parents." Mangan concluded that the novel "proved to be [Fante's] masterpiece."

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