“‘This neighborhood was kind of like home’: American Cities in Irish-American Fiction”

Although Irish emigration to the United States dates back to the 1700s when a few thousand mostly protestant Irish people moved to the new continent, it is not until the mid-1840s that Irish people started to reach the United States in great number. The impressive potato famine, commonly referred to as ―the Great Hunger‖, that hit Ireland between 1845 and 1849 caused million deaths on the island forcing other millions to leave their motherland to survive. It is estimated that almost 3.5 million Irish people entered the United States between 1820 and 1880. A few of them headed towards the American West, California, Montana and the prairies of Kansas, or found a new home in the rural provinces of New England. One of the first novels written by an Irish Immigrant is significantly entitled The Wilderness (1823) and deals with the life of Irish people in western Pennsylvania and their copying with the new natural environment met in the United States. Although peasants and coming from a country largely rural, the greatest part of these Irish immigrants settled, however, in metropolitan areas and adapted themselves to the hard life of the slums and ghettos of the American cities like New York, Boston, Chicago or San Francisco, now dramatically developing. The goal of my essay is to examine the Irish-American response to the urban space of the New World investigating works by Irish-American authors who have described in their works the experience of these immigrants in the United States, offering interesting cityscapes and focusing on symbols like the home, the street or the neighborhood to present the life of the Irish-American in the American cities.