The Books¶
Behind every great fortune there is a crime. The epigraph Puzo attached to the novel, attributed to Balzac — see below
Five novels, written across forty-three years by three authors, of which one is a genuine cultural event and the rest are downstream of it.
The library¶
| Book | Year | Author | Story years | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Godfather | 1969 | Mario Puzo | 1945–1955 | The source |
| The Sicilian | 1984 | Mario Puzo | 1943–1950 | Puzo's own sequel; loosely attached |
| The Godfather Returns | 2004 | Mark Winegardner | 1955–1962 | Estate-authorized interquel |
| The Godfather's Revenge | 2006 | Mark Winegardner | 1963–1964 | Estate-authorized; latest in chronology |
| The Family Corleone | 2012 | Ed Falco | 1933–1934 | Prequel, from a Puzo screenplay |
Plus one non-fiction volume that belongs on the shelf: The Godfather Notebook (2016), Coppola's working document, published in facsimile.
Reading order¶
If you've seen the films: read The Godfather. Stop there unless you want more.
If you want more: The Family Corleone next, because it's a prequel and doesn't contradict much, then Winegardner's two in order. The Sicilian last — it's the least connected and the most demanding.
If you have not seen the films: watch the films first. The novel's best material is improved by the adaptation so consistently that reading first is a downgrade. See Start Here.
What the novels have that the films don't¶
The 1969 novel is a substantially larger and messier object than the film cut from it. What Coppola left behind:
- Vito's entire backstory, told in flashback — the Sicilian childhood, the Fanucci murder, the olive oil business. Coppola cut it, then filmed most of it as half of Part II.
- Johnny Fontane's Hollywood career, a substantial subplot about a singer losing and rebuilding his voice, which Puzo treats seriously and the film reduces to two scenes.
- Lucy Mancini and Jules Segal — Sonny's mistress and the doctor she takes up with in Las Vegas. This storyline is the novel's most notorious material and the most reliable reason readers put it down.
- The internal mechanics of how the Families operate: the Commission, the accommodation with the police, the political payroll. Puzo explains; Coppola shows.
- Michael's Sicilian exile in detail, including the traitor Fabrizio's fate.
And the films have things the novel doesn't: the garden scene between Vito and Michael (written by Robert Towne), the ending of Part II, and everything in Part III.
Full comparison: Book vs. Film.
On that Balzac epigraph¶
Puzo's epigraph — "Behind every great fortune there is a crime" — is one of the most-quoted lines in the book, and Balzac did not write it.
The nearest real sentence is from Le Père Goriot: le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié — "the secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a forgotten crime." The compression into the punchier version predates Puzo, but The Godfather is why everyone knows it.
The misquotation is fitting for the book. Puzo took a piece of received wisdom, sharpened it past accuracy, and made it permanent — which is roughly what he did to the American public's idea of the Mafia. See Real-World Mafia.