PUZO, Mario

(b. 15 October 1920 in New York City; d. 2 July 1999 in Bay Shore, New York), novelist and screenwriter whose book The Godfather was not only one of the best-selling novels published in the 1960s, but changed the way Americans thought of organized crime.

Puzo was one of seven children born to railroad trackman Antonio Puzo and Maria Le Conti, both born in Italy. Growing up in Hell's Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan, he yearned to escape his working-class background, and later said that, while he was tempted to join up with the criminals in his neighborhood, his family kept him out of trouble. He served in World War II with the U.S. Army Air Corps, attaining the rank of corporal.

From the time he was in high school, Puzo had dreamed of becoming a writer. After the war, he made a step toward this dream by taking advantage of the G.I. Bill to take courses at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, both in New York City. He married Erika Lina Broske, with whom he would have five children, in 1946.

After years of minor jobs and freelance writing, Puzo published his first novel, a tale of postwar Germany called The Dark Arena, in 1955. A second work, The Fortunate Pilgrim, appeared in 1964. Both books received favorable reviews but earned a total of only $6,500. In debt, with a wife and children to support, Puzo talked an editor at G. P. Putnam's Sons into offering him a $5,000 advance for a novel about the Italian-American underground, a book he correctly saw as his opportunity for fame and fortune.

Published in 1969, The Godfather was an immediate success, and spent sixty-seven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Moreover, Fawcett Books bought the paperback rights for an unprecedented $410,000, and Paramount immediately obtained the film rights.

The book was not merely a best-seller; it was a phenomenon. It offered an apparently authentic look into the secretive world of the Italian-American criminal organization known as the Mafia. Puzo always insisted that he was far from a Mafia insider and that he wrote the book from gossip and research rather than firsthand knowledge.

The Godfather is a multifaceted work. It has many standard best-seller ingredients, including copious violence and a famously explicit sex scene in the very first chapter, as well as a character almost universally thought to be based on Frank Sinatra. Yet it also offers a richness of character, a multiplicity of subplots, and a level of descriptive detail far beyond that expected from the typical popular novel. The book has been accused of glorifying crime, but it unflinchingly describes the violence its characters commit. Rather than treating these criminals as simple villains, The Godfather describes them as complex people, motivated by family loyalty and respect, as well as by the desire for material gain.

The title of the book is ambiguous. At the beginning it refers to the old Godfather, Don Vito Corleone. We learn of the don's immigrant origins, living among criminals first in Sicily and then in America, losing his father and some friends to organized crime, finally killing an extortionist in self-defense and being moved to take the man's place and run organized crime right. He steps into the traditional businesses of bookmaking and loan sharking, and when the government is foolish enough to outlaw alcohol, he profits from that. He always starts out trying to reason with people, shunning gratuitous threats or violence, but if that fails, he will kill to protect his interests. He has principles: for instance, he draws the line at participating in the heroin trade, a stand that puts him in opposition to some of the other crime families and thus motivates much of the action in the book.

The Godfather is the tale of a family, as well as of an individual. Corleone has three sons, and he wants them to continue in the business. However, Sonny, the eldest, is rash; Fredo is weak; and the Ivy Leaguer Michael wants no part of organized crime. The father is ambivalent about Michael's feelings. He wants to move the family out of crime, as many billionaires have done—the book's epigraph is Honoré de Balzac's "Behind every great fortune there is a crime"—yet he knows that this cannot be done overnight.

An attempt on the old don's life by rival crime families impels Michael to join the fight, killing another family's leader and a corrupt cop. He is forced to hide out in Sicily for years, but eventually he returns and becomes the Godfather upon his father's death, moving the family closer to the final goal of legitimacy and respectability; nevertheless, he is still willing to kill those he considers threats.

Francis Ford Coppola wound up making The Godfather into three movies, with Puzo serving as coauthor for all three screenplays. Puzo also contributed to the screenplays for the first two Superman movies (1978, 1980) and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992). He had stated that the money he made from The Godfather would enable him to write a great serious novel, but though Fools Die (1978) sold well, it was generally considered a disappointment, badly organized and long-winded. Puzo published two other novels—The Sicilian (1984) and The Fourth K (1991)—then returned to the scene of his greatest triumph with two last tales of Mafia leaders, The Last Don (1996) and Omerta (2000), generally considered to have many of the strengths of The Godfather. He died of heart failure shortly after completing Omerta.

Puzo changed society's view of the Mafia with a single book. Paradoxically enough, this supposed glorification of crime is a conservative, law-and-order tale. The Godfather's values include family, loyalty, and trust, but also vigilante justice and keeping women in their place. It begins with an honest man who had feared the Godfather turning to him because the thugs who had brutally beaten his daughter were not punished by legitimate authority, whereupon the Godfather has them beaten (though not killed). It ends with the proud, intelligent woman Michael married submitting to the traditional role of the Mafia wife: taking care of the children and going to church every morning to pray for her husband's soul.

Puzo's papers are kept at Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts. He never wrote a full autobiography, but memoirs of his early life and of the writing and later success of The Godfather are found in his essay collection, The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions (1972). He was interviewed in Publishers Weekly (12 July 1978): 10–12. James Hall discusses The Dark Arena in Rediscoveries, edited by David Madden (1971). An obituary by Mel Gussow is in the New York Times (3 July 1999).

Arthur D. Hlavaty