Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Petracca moved to Los Angeles after the end of World War II (during which time he worked as a machinist in the Brooklyn Navy Yard) and worked a series of full-time jobs, mainly as a steam press operator for a laundry and linen rental service, while he pursued his writing in the evenings and began raising a family with his wife Lena.
Petracca used this same fictional family as the centerpiece for his first novel, Come Back to Sorrento, published by Little, Brown and Company in the United States, and Victor Gollancz in London, in 1953.
Petracca was subsequently hired by Fox studios as a contract writer and for the next several years wrote and collaborated on numerous screenplays, including Seven Cities of Gold [3] (1955) and The Proud Ones [4] (1956).
(1959) and The Proud Rebel [5] (1958), starring Alan Ladd, Olivia de Havilland, Dean Jagger and John Carradine, and directed by Michael Curtiz.
Prior to his death from cancer in 1963, Petracca wrote or collaborated on such television projects as Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond (1960), seven episodes of The Untouchables, (1959-1961), The Asphalt Jungle [6] (1961), Route 66, Sam Benedict [7] (1962), Rawhide (1962-1963), and The Richard Boone Show (1963).