Carlos Bulosan

America Is in the Heart calls itself a personal history and is not quite one. Carlos Bulosan built it from his own life and from what happened to other Filipino men who reached the West Coast in the same years, so episodes he did not live are told in the first person anyway. He landed in Seattle in 1930 at seventeen, followed the harvests from California up to the Alaska canneries, and found the work organised around keeping men like him moving and underpaid. Tuberculosis put him in a Los Angeles hospital for two years in the late thirties, where he read through the ward library and began writing seriously. The Laughter of My Father sold well in 1944 and was received as folk comedy, which irritated him, since he had meant it as satire. He edited a union yearbook for the cannery workers and died in Seattle in 1956, at forty-two.