Mario Puzo

Mario Puzo was one of twelve children born to Neapolitan parents who emigrated from Italy to New York. He grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, a tough neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side with a large population of Italian and Irish immigrants. Puzo’s father abandoned the family when Mario was twelve years old, leaving his strong-willed mother to raise the family on her own. During World War II, Puzo served in the army but saw no combat due to his poor eyesight. After the war, he returned to New York and pursued a writing career. He wrote articles for men’s magazines such as Swank and Male and published two novels: The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965). Both novels received critical praise but met with poor sales. By the late 1960s, Puzo was a father of five in deep financial debt, so he purposely tried to write a hit novel. The result was 1969’s The Godfather, a bestselling tale of life in an Italian-American Mafia family that became a cultural phenomenon and inspired an Academy Award-winning movie trilogy from director Francis Ford Coppola. Puzo wrote several more novels and screenplays throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s before he died of heart failure in 1999. His last work, another Mafia epic called Omerta, was published posthumously in 2000.