Albert P. Melone

About the Author

Albert P. Melone is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). A third generation Italian American, the author was born in Chicago, Illinois, and was educated in the public schools of Chicago and Southern California. He first matriculated at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut California. He received his B.A. and M.A. degrees in political science from California State University, Los Angeles, and studied law for a year at Loyola University, Los Angeles. After teaching at Idaho State University, he went on to receive the Ph.D. degree at the University of Iowa. He was a member and chair of the Department of Political Science at North Dakota State University during the 1970s, and became a member of the SIUC faculty in 1979, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in judicial process and behavior, constitutional law, comparative judicial politics, and American government and politics. He directed graduate students in the completion of their M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He is the recipient in 1991 of the Outstanding Teaching Award, College of Liberal Arts, and was active in university affairs, serving as President of the Faculty and President of the Faculty Senate. He has lectured and held seminars abroad including Oxford University, and at Chinese and Bulgarian institutions of higher learning. After his retirement in 2005, he taught two blocs at Colorado College in consecutive years as a Visiting Professor. Melone is the author of numerous scholarly articles, book chapters, encyclopedia pieces, and book reviews. He has authored or co-authored ten book titles and well over a dozen volumes including second editions and reprints. In 2012, SIUC honored him for his academic contributions as a campus author. He presently resides in Shiloh, Illinois, located in the metro-east area across from the Mississippi River and the City of St. Louis. Mezzogiorno in Chicago: Love and Trouble on Ogden Avenue is his first work of fiction. Melone writes in the Acknowledgments,"After a lifetime of university teaching, research, and writing many scholarly tomes . . . it took considerable effort for me to screw up the courage necessary to wander from the confines of my familiar intellectual reservation to employ fiction as a teaching tool." In the end, Mezzogiorno in Chicago has much to teach Italian Americans and the country at large.