Joseph Rocchietti

Joseph Rocchietti was an Italian-American novelist.

A native of Casale Monferrato in Piedmont, he emigrated to the United States in 1831. He was active as a writer there during the years 1835–1875 and is best known for Lorenzo and Oonalaska (1835), which is the earliest known novel by an Italian-American. This epistolary novel, a love story written in English, is set partly in Europe and partly in Virginia.

He also published a number of long essays including one against the Massachusetts ‘nativist’ movement which was reviewed by Edgar Allan Poe in Poe's Broadway Journal.