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    America Is in the Heart: A Personal History
    Unavailable
    America Is in the Heart: A Personal History
    Unavailable
    America Is in the Heart: A Personal History
    Ebook444 pages6 hours

    America Is in the Heart: A Personal History

    By Carlos Bulosan, Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Washington Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9780295805016
    Unavailable
    America Is in the Heart: A Personal History
    Author

    Carlos Bulosan

    Carlos Sampayan Bulosan (1911-1956) was an English-language Filipino novelist and poet who immigrated to America in 1930. His best-known work today is the semi-autobiographical America is in the Heart, but he first gained fame for his 1943 essay on The Freedom from Want. Born to Ilocano parents in the Philippines in Binalonan, Pangasinan, Bulosan spent most of his youth in the countryside as a farmer. During his youth he and his family were economically impoverished by the rich and political elite, which would become one of the main themes of his writing. Following the pattern of many Filipinos during the American colonial period, he left for America in 1930 at age 17, in the hope of finding salvation from the economic depression of his home. He never again saw his Philippine homeland. Upon arriving in Seattle, he began working low paying jobs. In 1936, Bulosan suffered from tuberculosis, underwent three operations, and spent two years mostly in the convalescent ward. During his long stay in the hospital, he spent his time reading and writing. Following the release of America is in the Heart in 1946, he was celebrated for giving a post-colonial, Asian immigrant perspective to the labor movement in America, and for telling the experience of Filipinos working in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1970s, with a resurgence in Asian/Pacific Islander American activism, his unpublished writings were discovered in a library in the University of Washington leading to posthumous releases of several unfinished works and anthologies of his poetry. One of his most famous essays, published in March 1943, was chosen by The Saturday Evening Post to accompany its publication of the Norman Rockwell painting Freedom from Want, part of a series based on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” speech. Bulosan died in Seattle on September 11, 1956, aged 42. He is buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery on Queen Anne Hill in Seattle.

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    Reviews for America Is in the Heart

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      This "memoir-novel" (the amalgamation of Bulosan's experiences with others he witnessed or heard about) tells the story of his immigration to America from the Philipines during the Great Depression. Bulosan's language is unambiguous and direct, but the same quality holds his writing back from the transcendent depictions of bigotry and oppression achieved by writer-activists like Frederick Douglass or Bill Mullen.
    • 5/5
      If you are interested in the true racism that Filipinos experienced when coming to America in the twentieth century, then this book is for you. It is heartbreaking to think of the troubled lives they lived while trying to make a better life for their families. This book will make you appreciate our own life and accomplishments.
    • 2/5
      Hard not to compare to the Grapes of Wrath. It is an important part of history that very much deserves our attention. The writing and storytelling is unfortunately a slog.
    • 4/5
      A slow read, but so important.