SOURCE: Collins, Richard. “Fante's Confessional: Stories or Plain Fiction.” In John Fante: A Literary Portrait, pp. 51-72. Toronto: Guernica, 2000.

In the following essay, Collins delineates the major thematic concerns of the stories comprising Dago Red.

Dago Red

When you go to Confession you must tell everything.

—Jimmy Toscana in “The Road to Hell”

The individual stories collected in Dago Red (1940) show Fante practicing the basic elements of his craft, testing his voice for its tonal capabilities, and organizing his experience for its unifying themes. All the themes that appear later in the novels are tested here: an obsession with family, the Church, and the fate of the immigrant in America, as well as the writer's compulsion to absolve himself of his past sins against all three through the confessional of fiction. None of these conflicts exists in isolation, and in the best of the stories—“A Kidnaping in...