The Immigrants

The Immigrants is a historical novel by the American writer Howard Fast, published in 1977 and set in San Francisco in the early twentieth century.

Dan Lavette is the son of an Italian mother and a French father, and the novel follows him from the fishing fleet to the ownership of a shipping company and a bank. The families who take him in after the earthquake are Italian and Jewish, and their children and he grow up together in a city where money is being made by people whose parents arrived with nothing. Dan's difficulty is not poverty but appetite: he marries the daughter of the richest family in the city without loving her, and the book describes what that decision does to him and to the people around him. Fast writes the city as a set of communities, Irish, Italian, Chinese and Jewish, each with its own institutions and its own grudges.

The book was the first of a family saga, and it reached the bestseller lists in the year it appeared.