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Joe Andriano
Autobiographical Notes


On a cold December afternoon in Albany, NY, I was born Joseph Dominic Andrews. 

In 1907, when my paternal grandfather arrived at Ellis Island, his name was clearly entered "Rocco Andriano" on the ship manifest, but by the 1930 census he had anglicized the name to "Andrews." This was a common practice at the time, especially in upstate New York where there was plenty of bias against Italian immigrants. So I was baptized "Joseph Andrews" (see "Poem of my Names," in Selected Early Poems, for a humorous take on this).

By the time I was in college, I was the occasional object of muffled laughter in English classes when the professor called roll. I tried to assure my classmates that I was not a figment of Henry Fielding's imagination. This was at Stony Brook University (part of SUNY), where I got my B.A. in English in 1970. I got my M.A. from Binghamton University (also SUNY) in 1972.

Armed with my Masters degree, I lived in Boston for almost a year, driving a cab and even working for a few months as a bellhop and switchboard operator at the Brahmin blue-bloody Somerset Club on Beacon Street. I still had the Anglo name at the time; they would never have hired an Andriano! By the way, I spent so much time sitting down doing nothing at that job that I was able to read Gravity's Rainbow, which oddly enough actually mentions the Somerset Club (p. 23). The job there was so depressing I ran far away, once again to graduate school, now among the rolling hills of the Palouse, in eastern Washington.

It was my father's dying wish (he succumbed to cancer in 1969) that we change our name back to the original Italian--which my brothers and I did in 1973, when I was working on my Ph.D at Washington State University. From then on, I was Joseph Dominic Andriano. I left WSU in 1978 without a degree, ABD (all but dead? all but dissertation).

I moved to Louisiana in 1979 to begin an Instructorship at what was then the University of Southwestern Louisiana. The woman who would become my wife was a student in one of my American Lit. classes. By the way, we did not start seeing each other until several months after she earned her A! I married Gail, the love of my life, in April 1984. (She's not falling asleep there; she's looking at the wedding rites we wrote. The priest, by the way, was a colleague of mine in the English Dept., the late Rev. James Cox.)

After going nowhere as an M.A. instructor, I started working on my dissertation, and finally received my Ph.D. from WSU in 1986, which I probably never would have done if I hadn't married Gail.

Here I am in April 2016, fielding a question at my "Last Lecture"



After 37 years teaching, I retired from UL Lafayette in May 2016. Salute!

There's also a biographical sketch on the UL English Department website.