(1920-1999)
Making an impressive case for imagination over experience, Mario Puzo always claimed he had never met a gangster in his life before he completed the topic that became the most famous gangster story of all time. The Godfather was written following the publication of two serious, consciously “literary” novels that netted the author barely a few thousand dollars and disappeared without a trace. Puzo then made a vow: to hell with literature, he was going to write something people would actually want to read. An expensive medical emergency—a gallbladder attack—increased his sense of failure and resolve, and he upped the ante: the next topic, he decided, was going to make him a million bucks.
A New York City native, child of working-class parents, Puzo wrote stories as a young boy and dreamed of a life as a published author. He served in the army air corps during World War II and saw action in France, for which he won numerous decorations (although Puzo would always scoff at any notion of his wartime heroism). His first novel, The Dark Arena, was published in 1955, with the aforementioned results. He went to work as an editor and staff writer at a company that published a line of men’s interest magazines, from second-string versions of Playboy to the sort of “true adventure” titles that featured material about crime, race cars, hunting, call girls, and lots of war stories about U.S. Marines and curvy nurses trapped on Pacific islands.
Puzo’s years in pulp journalism gave him a vast mental storehouse of sensational material, including numerous juicy stories about the gangster families of New York. His resolve to write something commercial coincided with a topic editor’s interest in some of his Mafia anecdotes. Puzo began to research the subject, looking at topics and old newspapers, tracing the makeup and doings of the big gangland families that had ruled the East Coast branches of the Cosa Nostra. He mapped out a story line, fictional but with clear ties to the historical events—a big canvas centered on the doings of an old-school Mafia family, the Corleones, and their aged patriarch, Don Vito. The story would be loaded with strong characters, violent set pieces, sex scenes, romance, tragedy, titillating references to real-life events and persons, and dramatic use of juicy urban folklore, like the mobster influence in Hollywood and in the career of a crooner suspiciously similar to Frank Sinatra.
The Godfather was published to mostly good reviews, and even those who derided it as pulp fiction acknowledged its narrative force and its compulsive readability. The topic soon topped the best-seller lists, selling millions. Puzo found the fame and wealth he desired, and then some (though it was not without its down side: Puzo would forever have to deny that he or his family had any actual mob connections, and an irate Frank Sinatra once verbally attacked him in a restaurant, calling him a whore). In 1972, the release of the legendary movie version starring Marlon Brando increased the sales of Puzo’s novel but also overshadowed it. The critical consensus was that the topic was a potboiler, the film was art.
Puzo’s next novel was understandably the focus of great expectation. It was to be an even thicker topic, with lots of violence, sex, and tawdry settings in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and elsewhere. In concept, the topic had all the earmarks of another blockbuster, but Fools Die would not find The Godfather’s enthusiastic audience. Many readers found Puzo’s lengthy account of the tortured life of his angst- and vice-sodden hero less than compelling, and considered the plot aimless and pretentious, the writing repetitive and dull.
Six years would pass before Puzo published another novel. The Sicilian returned to sure commercial ground with a story that many would inaccurately label a Godfather “prequel.” Set in the post-World War II era on the island where the Mafia supposedly originated, The Sicilian fictionalized the life story of a real and very well-known local hero, Salvatore Giuliano, the so-called Robin Hood of Sicily. Puzo entertainingly recounted the dramatic and bloody conflict between Giuliano’s bandit gang, the Mafia, and the government forces struggling to control them both.
Puzo’s next topic, The Fourth K, was pure hokum, a schlocky thriller with a White House setting about a new president (modeled on John F. Kennedy) whose vengeful reaction to a family crisis threatens to plunge the world into chaos and destruction. With The Last Don, published 27 years after The Godfather, Puzo returned to the scene of his greatest success. Not a sequel, but instead a conscious rejuggling of elements that had worked so well in the earlier novel, The Last Don dealt with another wise old patriarch, two battling brothers born to the mob, and a return journey to Puzo’s favorite, familiar settings: New York, Hollywood, and Las Vegas.
The last in what Puzo began calling a “Mafia trilogy,” Omerta was published posthumously: the author died of a heart attack on July 2, 1999. Omerta, one last time, contained the ingredients Puzo had come to accept as mandatory for a topic carrying his name: the mob, the code of honor, the coming of age, the battle for domination among violently opposed forces. But the topic read at times like a film treatment, the simple prose and shallow character descriptions seemingly intended not as a great read but as the guidelines for a production. Like Margaret Mitchell, Grace metalious, William Peter Blatty, and other authors of seminal, phenomenal best-sellers, Puzo never managed to top or even equal his first great success.
Works
- Dark Arena, The (1955);
- Fools Die (1978);
- Fortunate Pilgrim, The (1964);
- Fourth K, The (1991);
- Godfather, The (1969);
- Last Don, The (1996);
- Omerta (2000);
- Sicilian, The (1984)
