Giuseppe Prezzolini was an important Italian intellectual in the first half of the 20th century. As director of Columbia's Casa Italiana and as a journalist, he had much opportunity to meet Italian Americans of various types. His trenchant but painful observations are gathered in his book I Trapiantati (The Transplanted) (1962), the main point of which is that Italians in America, though economically successful, paid an enormous price - they're "mutilated" in their original language, and thus mutilated in spirit; they've lost contact with those from whom they sprang, without being comfortable with or centered among Americans. Prezzolini's mistake was that he assumed that things would not change, that assimilation would not advance beyond his point of observation in early-mid 20th century, that Italian Americans would always remain in some sense on the periphery of American life. He was wrong (for the most part).