Mario Puzo

Mario Francis Puzo (October 15, 1920 – July 2, 1999) was an American novelist and screenwriter of Italian descent. He wrote crime fiction about the Mafia, and his name is inseparable from The Godfather, the book that made him one of the best-known chroniclers of organized crime in twentieth-century American literature. He wrote in English, and his importance lies as much in the films that grew out of his work as in the novels themselves.

He was born in Hell's Kitchen, a poor neighbourhood of Manhattan, to immigrants from the Avellino area of Campania. His father, a railroad worker, was committed to a psychiatric hospital for schizophrenia when Mario was about twelve, leaving his mother to raise seven children on very little money. That childhood of scarcity, set within a tightly knit Italian community, supplied much of the material he later turned into fiction. He studied at the City College of New York, served in the United States Army during the Second World War, stationed in Germany, and then worked at a variety of jobs, including as an editor on popular magazines, while continuing to write stories and novels.

His first novel, The Dark Arena, appeared in 1955 and was well received, but his breakthrough came in 1969 with The Godfather. Puzo said the story grew out of research into organized crime rather than personal experience, and that he wanted to write something with broad popular appeal. It was a considerable success, spending 67 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His prose is plain and direct, and he combined brutal violence with a close look at family loyalty, power and corruption, which gave the crime novel the sweep of a family saga.

Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation appeared in 1972, and Puzo won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, repeating the honour in 1974 for the sequel. He also wrote the original screenplay for Superman (1978) and its 1980 follow-up. His later novels included The Last Don and The Fourth K, the latter a more speculative political story. Omertà was nearly finished when he died of heart failure in 1999, and The Family was published posthumously in 2001.

His legacy extends beyond commercial success. Puzo helped fix in popular culture an image of the Mafia as a family structure built on power and loyalty, an image that shaped many later novels and television series. His work is still read as one of the most recognisable versions of the organized-crime novel in English.