Mario Gianluigi Puzo

Background

Mario Gianluigi Puzo was born on October 15, 1920, in New York, Uniteв States. He was the son of Antonio Puzo, a railroad trackman, and Maria (Le Conti) Puzo.

Education

Puzo attended New School for Social Research (now New School University) and Columbia University.

Career

The son of immigrants who moved to the Hell's Kitchen area of New York City from their native Italy, Puzo had dreamed of being a writer since high school but had struggled for years to achieve a footing in the publishing world. After serving in the U.S. Army in World War II, he worked as a freelance writer while attending City College of New York on the G.I. Bill. During this period, he completed his first novel, Dark Arena, which was published in 1955. A second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, was published nine years later. Though these books received positive reviews, they were not commercial successes; Puzo earned a mere $6,500 from their combined sales. Struggling to support his wife and five children, Puzo slipped into debt; fortunately, as he told a writer for Time, an incident in 1955 convinced him to change his priorities.

Ten years later, Puzo got his chance to act on his goal. Late in 1965 a Putnam editor stopped in at Magazine Management's offices, overheard Puzo telling Mafia yarns and offered a $5,000 advance for a book about the Italian underworld. The result was The Godfather, and the rest, is publishing history. In "The Godfather" Papers and Other Confessions, Puzo stated that The Godfather was written "to make money … I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist." Nevertheless, Puzo sat down and produced a novel which had enormous force and kept you turning the pages. The Godfather became the best-selling novel of the 1970s, outselling that decade's other blockbusters - such heavyweights as The Exorcist, Love Story, and Jaws - by millions of copies. It remained on the New York Times best-seller list for sixty-seven weeks, and was also a best-seller in England, France, Germany.

After The Godfather and "The Godfather" Papers and Other Confessions, Puzo focused his attention on screenwriting, first as coauthor of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II, then as coauthor of the films Earthquake, Superman, and Superman II. Special effects, rather than story or plot, highlight the last three films. In October 1978 Puzo's long-awaited fourth novel, Fools Die, was published. The headlines and cover stories surrounding its publication began in June - four months before the first hardcover edition went on sale - when New American Library paid an unprecedented $2.2 million for the paperback rights, plus $350,000 for the reprint rights to The Godfather. In spite of the hoopla concerning this record-setting price, or perhaps because of it, critical reaction to Fools Die was mixed.

In 1984 Puzo, returned to the safer ground of Sicily, the Mafia, and the Corleone family with his novel The Sicilian, which Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times claimed "might more aptly be designated The Godfather, Part I I/II." In 1988, Puzo was once again approached by Coppola, who had developed an idea for continuing the "Godfather" saga, and less than a year later the screenplay for The Godfather: Part III was completed. When The Godfather: Part III was released on Christmas Day, 1990, sixteen years had passed since the last "Godfather" movie - enough time for critics and moviegoers to build almost insurmountable expectations for this newest installment. With The Last Don, written after recovering from quadruple-bypass heart surgery and a protracted convalescence, Puzo produced another crime-family novel, this time introducing a new family - the Clericuzio.

Omerta, Puzo's final novel, can be seen as a "tying up of loose ends," according to National Review writer Victorino Matus. Puzo died shortly after completing the manuscript; Omerta was published posthumously in 2000, quickly making bestseller lists and attracting Hollywood attention. Before his death, Puzo was working on yet another "mob" story, this one centered on the fifteenth-century Spanish Borgia family, which the author considered to be the "original crime family."

Achievements

• Academy Award-winning screenwriter Puzo is best known for bringing the Mafia to the masses through his book The Godfather and the trilogy of movies it spawned. Though some critics have dismissed his best-sellers for pandering too much to commercial tastes, Italian-American novelist and screenwriter Mario Puzo forever changed the way the world thought of the Mafia. His "Godfather" books and the films on which they were based have become undisputed classics of twentieth-century popular literature, garnering both popular and critical acclaim and setting a new standard for the fictional treatment of organized crime.
  
  Despite the shortcomings critics have found in Puzo's later work, his contributions to American culture continue to be readily acknowledged. Puzo's achievement mirrors that of many modern American writers who, despite early critical success, had to resort to commercial formulas to find a large audience. However indirect Puzo's route to literary fame the author's place as "an authentic American literary voice" is assured.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Last Don: A Novel

    (The Last Don is Domenico Clericuzio, a wise and ruthless ...)

    1996
  • Fools Die: A Thriller

    (Played out in the underground worlds of high-stakes gambl...)

    1978
  • The Fourth K: A Novel

    (President Francis Xavier Kennedy is elected to office, in...)

    1990
  • The Family

    (The crowning achievement of a truly phenomenal career, Ma...)

    2001
  • The Fortunate Pilgrim: A Novel

    (Puzo's classic story about the loves, crimes and struggle...)

    1965
  • The Dark Arena: A Novel

    (After coming home at the end of World War II, Walter Mosc...)

    1955
  • Omerta: A Novel

    (To Don Raymonde Aprile's children he was a loyal family m...)

    2000
  • Six Graves to Munich

    (Michael Rogan was an intelligence officer behind enemy li...)

    1967
  • The Sicilian: A Novel

    (The year is 1950. Michael Corleone is nearing the end of ...)

    1984
  • The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions 1972
  • The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw 1966
  • The Godfather 1969
  • Inside Las Vegas 1977

• video

  • The Godfather Part II

    (The continuing saga of the Corleone crime family tells th...)

    1974
  • The Godfather

    (Director Coppola paints a chilling portrait of the Sicili...)

    1972
  • Earthquake

    (Charlton Heston leads an all-star cast in this epic thril...)

    1974
  • Superman II

    (Christopher Reeve and Gene Hackman and an all-star cast a...)

    1980
  • A Time For Dying

    (Budd Boetticher's last feature, this film also marks the ...)

    1982
  • The Godfather Part III

    (One of the greatest sagas in movie history continues. In ...)

    1990
  • Superman II (The Richard Donner Cut)

    (It's the version you've never seen. Finally released as v...)

    2006
  • Superman 1978
  • The Cotton Club 1984
  • The Sicilian 1987

Views

Though The Godfather was Puzo's commercial breakthrough, catapulting him to fame and fortune, the author did not consider the novel to be his best work. Puzo felt his best book was his second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, the story of an Italian-American family in New York City that is based in Puzo's own background. Puzo claimed that he had intended to write about himself, but the character of Lucia Santa, based on his mother, became so strong that he made her the novel's focus.

Quotations: "I wished like hell I'd written it better. I wrote below my gifts in that book."

Personality

Puzo grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York, but said repeatedly that, although the streets could be mean, he never had any real-life dealing with mobsters, and he claimed his characters were based on research.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Puzo's work virtually created the Mafia as literary and cinematic subject." - Karl Taro Greenfeld
  
  "Puzo, like the naturalistic writers of the early twentieth century, excelled at depicting street life and "the underbelly of social institutions." - James B. Hall

Interests

• Italian cuisine, dieting

• Sport & Clubs

  Gambling, tennis

Connections

In 1946, Puzo married Erika Lina Broske. Puzo had five children: Anthony, Joey, Dorothy, Virginia and Eugene.

Father:

Antonio Puzo

Mother:

Maria (Le Conti) Puzo

Son:

Anthony Puzo

Daughter:

Virginia Puzo

Son:

Eugene Puzo

Son:

Joey Puzo

Daughter:

Dorothy Puzo

Wife:

Erika Lina Broske

References

• DLB 6: American Novelists since World War II, Second Series (Dictionary of Literary Biography) This DLB volume supplements Volume 2 with 70 additional biographical entries covering American novelists actively writing during this period of extraordinary proliferation for the literary form. Among them are interesting new talents...and many others of striking quality, writes William Targ in the volumes foreword.
  1980
• The Immigrant Experience: The Anguish of Becoming American Nine narratives by immigrants and their descendants illuminate the experience of becoming American. Contributors include Czeslaw Milosz, and Mario Puzo.
  1992