The Godfather
Mario Gianluigi Puzo was born in 1920 in Manhattan into a poor family who had emigrated from Campania, Italy. After military service in Germany during the Second World War, he studied at the New School for Social Research and at Columbia University in New York, and wrote stories for men’s pulp magazines. His first two novels (published in 1955 and 1965) achieved critical acclaim but not financial success, and Puzo wanted to write something with popular appeal in order to support his family of five children. The result was The Godfather (1969), which sold 21 million copies worldwide. Together with its sequels, The Sicilian(1984) and Omertà (2000), The Godfather redefined the gangster genre and introduced terms like omertà and cosa nostra to a mass readership, although Puzo always insisted that he wrote ‘entirely from research’ and had no personal links to the Mafia. He later wrote the screenplays for the three Godfather movies, for which he won two Academy Awards. Puzo’s final work, The Family, was completed by his companion Carol Gino and published posthumously in 2001. Its subject was the notorious Borgias, ‘the original crime family’ who had provided inspiration for many ideas in his original Mafia novels.
Jonathan Freedland is an award-winning journalist, novelist and broadcaster. He has been a columnist for the Guardian since 1997 and was previously the paper’s Washington correspondent. He is also the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s contemporary history series The Long View, as well as contributing regularly to a range of US publications, including the New York Review of Books. In 2014 he was awarded the Orwell Special Prize for journalism. He is the author of 11 books, nine of them best-selling thrillers under the name Sam Bourne. The latest is To Kill a Man (Quercus, 2020).