Home is an Island

"Home is an Island" is California writer Alfred Lewis's only novel, published by Random House in 1951, tells the tale of a young man in the Azores about to immigrate to America. It became a bestseller and was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, Chicago Sunday Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle, among other publications. The story is a semi-autobiographical narrative based on the author's childhood. Born in 1902 on the island of Flores, Alfred Lewis emigrated from the Azores to the United States in 1922; he first arrived in Providence, Rhode Island and then moved on to California, where he settled in the small San Joaquin Valley town of Los Banos and lived for the rest of his life until his death in 1977.