The Godfather (novel by Mario Puzo) | Introduction & Analysis (2024)

The Godfather, novel by Mario Puzo, published in 1969, which became one of the most successful fiction books ever—selling some 21 million copies worldwide, spawning three critically and financially successful motion pictures, and placing its characters into the contemporary American cultural mythology.

Although Puzo had no personal knowledge of organized crime, thorough research and family connections gave him the details he needed for his chronicle of a fictional Mafia family, the Corleones. Puzo collaborated with director Francis Ford Coppola on the screenplay of The Godfather (1972) and its two sequels (1974 and 1990). The first two won nine Academy Awards, including best picture and best screenplay Oscars for each.

Few novels have forced themselves into the cultural imagination as brutally as Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Arriving on the bestseller list at a highly contentious moment in U.S. history, when political institutions and social practices were being scrutinized and questioned as never before, The Godfather poses provocative questions about the origins and legitimacy of power won by violence.

Puzo based the character of Don Vito Corleone on a real-life Mafia boss, Sicilian-born Joseph Bonanno, who headed the New York-based Bonanno family crime syndicate until “retiring” to Tucson, Arizona. Bonanno, who was displeased with Puzo’s book, refused to acknowledge that the Mafia was a real entity, instead insisting on calling it by the anodyne name “The Tradition.” Puzo, a veteran of combat in World War II and himself an Italian American, drew on his experiences to create the character of Michael Corleone, Don Vito’s presumptive heir.

Realistic and often profane, the novel purports to show how things “really” work, while also playing games with the reader. Making the bad guys seem good, the novel redefined the gangster genre. Puzo’s strategy of rhetorical inversion, overturning conventional moral presuppositions of right and wrong, enforces a new understanding of the manipulative and treacherous capacities of language. Twisting distinctions between hero and villain, Puzo’s enthralling story of the Corleone’s “family business” and Italian-American immigrant culture serves to affirm the outlaw character of America in general.

Although The Godfather has filtered into the culture mostly through the movie trilogy and other derivations, most notably the long-running television series The Sopranos, the novel remains the driving force behind the mobster culture industry. It is the novel that gives us such legendary sayings as “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse” and “a lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.” Above all, in spite and perhaps because of the clear, accessible prose, the novel testifies to the myth-making potential of contemporary writing. Puzo’s depictions of Italian Americans have been seen as both celebratory and defamatory: either way, Puzo’s The Godfather remains remarkably influential, compelling, and readable.