Mario Puzo

In "The Godfather," Puzo also rather handily accomplished his goal of depicting the immigrant's struggle in the New World. Italian-Americans may have chafed at his having capitalized on the unpleasant reality of the Mafia in a way that doubtlessly perpetuated ugly stereotypes -- "That's Mafia style, isn't it? All olive oil and sweet talk," says one character -- but in a strange way they also embraced the tale. (For years "The Godfather" theme song was a staple at many Italian-American weddings.) The book and film had, at least, made their community visible. And, certainly, the role of the Corleone family as outsiders in a white-bread, straight world sounded a larger theme for many immigrants. In between the guns and the cannoli, Puzo had, in fact, made his story of ethnic isolation and striving accessible to millions of readers.

Even when writing with the meter running, Puzo could unreel the kind of phrasing that slips permanently into the language. If you know only the film adaptations of "The Godfather," you might be surprised to discover that the novel is nearly word-for-word the same story (except for a weird digression about Sonny's girlfriend's gynecological problems). The novel's talky dialogue was pared down to epigrammatic utterance by Puzo for the movie -- "Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes" -- thus the movie feels more Shakespearean and less like the gritty realist genre effort it was meant to be. The novel's wise guys don't appear on the scene like archetypal forces of nature as do their cinematic counterparts. Instead, they act like refugees from a Hemingway novel -- ambivalent about the codes by which they've chosen to live. (Indeed, Puzo's first novel, "The Dark Arena," was set in post-World War II Europe and can be characterized as a sharply done, more sexually knowing update of "The Sun Also Rises.") Aside from codifying an American myth and gracing it with memorable phraseology -- "I made him an offer he couldn't refuse" -- Puzo's most notable achievement in "The Godfather" may be bringing up the volume on crime's social dimension, the chitchat of murderous men, and making possible logomaniacal progeny such as "Pulp Fiction."

Puzo's last unpublished novel was titled "Omerta" (the Cosa Nostra code of silence). As poet laureate of the Mafia, he was unable to escape telling its highly marketable tales; judging by the endless stream of top-grossing Mafia books and movies, you'd guess that Mafia entertainment far out-grosses the actual criminal enterprise. The siren call of this big money may have led him astray from high-minded art, but it assured him a place of honor in the carnival tent of pop culture. In his famous novel he wrote, "Italians have a little joke, that the world is so hard a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that's why they have godfathers." Indeed, Puzo's iconic creation, Don Corleone, had two fathers -- the pulp writer and the serious novelist. Together they made us all a storytelling offer we couldn't refuse.

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