Gregory Nunzio Corso (March 26, 1930 – January 17, 2001) was an American poet and a key member of the Beat movement. He was one of the youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers (with Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs).
Early life
Born Nunzio Corso at New York City's St. Vincent's Hospital, Corso later selected the name "Gregory" as a confirmation name. Within Little Italy and its community he was "Nunzio," while he dealt with others as "Gregory." He often would use "Nunzio" as short for "Annunziato," the announcing angel Gabriel, hence a poet. Corso identified with not only Gabriel but also Hermes, the divine messenger.
Corso's mother, Michelina Corso (born Colonna), was born in Miglianico, Abruzzo, Italy, and immigrated to the United States at the age of nine, with her mother and four other sisters. At 16, she married Sam Corso, a first-generation Italian American, also teenage, and gave birth to Nunzio Corso the same year. They lived at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal, the heart of Greenwich Village and upper Little Italy.
Childhood
Sometime in his first year, Corso's mother mysteriously abandoned him, leaving him at the New York child care home, a branch of the Catholic Church Charities. Corso's father, Sam "Fortunato" Corso, a garment center worker, found the infant and promptly put him in a foster home. Michelina came to New York from Trenton but her life was threatened by Sam. One of Michelina's sisters was married to a New Jersey mobster who offered to give Michelina her "vengeance," that is to kill Sam. Michelina declined and returned to Trenton without her child. Sam consistently told Corso that his mother had returned to Italy and deserted the family. He was also told that she was a prostitute and was "disgraziata" (disgraced) and forced into Italian exile. Sam told the young boy several times, "I should have flushed you down the toilet." It was 67 years before Corso learned the truth of his mother's disappearance.
Corso spent the next 11 years in foster care in at least five different homes. His father rarely visited him. When he did, Corso was often abused: "I'd spill jello, and the foster home people would beat me. Then my father would visit, and he'd beat me again—a double whammy." As a foster child, Corso was among thousands that the Church aided during the Depression, with the intention of reconstituting families as the economy picked up. Corso went to Catholic parochial schools, was an altar boy and a gifted student. His father, in order to avoid the military draft, brought Gregory home in 1941. Nevertheless, Sam Corso was drafted and sent overseas.
Corso, then alone, became a homeless child on the streets of Little Italy. For warmth he slept in subways in the winter, and then slept on rooftops during the summer. He continued to attend Catholic school, not telling authorities he was living on the streets. With permission, he took breakfast bread from a bakery in Little Italy. Street food stall merchants would give him food in exchange for running errands.
Adolescence
At age 13, Corso was asked to deliver a toaster to a neighbor. While he was running the errand, a passerby offered money (around 94 dollars) for the toaster, and Corso sold it. He used the money to buy a tie and white shirt, and dressed up to see The Song of Bernadette, a movie about the mystical appearance of the Virgin Mary to Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes. On returning from the movie, the police apprehended him. Corso claimed he was seeking a miracle, namely to find his mother. Corso had a lifelong affection for saints and holy men: "They were my only heroes." Nonetheless, he was arrested for petty larceny and incarcerated in The Tombs, New York's infamous jail. Corso, though only 13 years old, was celled next to an adult, criminally insane murderer who had stabbed his wife repeatedly with a screwdriver. The exposure left Corso traumatized. Neither Corso's stepmother nor his paternal grandmother would post his $50 bond. With his own mother missing and unable to make bail, he remained in the Tombs.
Later, in 1944 during a New York blizzard, a 14-year-old freezing Corso broke into his tutor's office for warmth, and fell asleep on a desk. He slept through the blizzard and was arrested for breaking and entering and booked into the Tombs for a second time with adults. Terrified of other inmates, he was sent to the psychiatric ward of Bellevue Hospital Center and later released.