The Godfather (1969)¶

At a glance¶

Author: Mario Puzo
Published: March 10, 1969
Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons
Cover design: S. Neil Fujita
Story years: 1945–1955
Length: ~450 pages
Sales: 9M+ copies in two years
Bestseller list: 67 weeks
Film rights: Optioned for $12,500 against $80,000 — before the book was finished

I wrote it to make money… I was 45 years old and tired of being an artist. Mario Puzo, on The Godfather

The most commercially successful novel of its decade, written by a man who had produced two critically respected and commercially dead books and needed to pay off gambling debts. Puzo was explicit about this for the rest of his life, with a bluntness that has protected the book from serious literary consideration ever since — including from him.

He was also, by his own account, wrong about it. The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965), the novel he was proud of, sank without trace. The Godfather has never been out of print.

How it got written¶

By the mid-1960s Mario Puzo was 45, working for men's adventure magazines under the pen name Mario Cleri, supporting a family of seven, and roughly $20,000 in debt — mostly from gambling.

He had never met a gangster. This is the fact people find hardest to believe about the book, and Puzo said it repeatedly: the Mafia in The Godfather is built out of research, newspaper morgues, the Kefauver and Valachi hearing transcripts, and his own Neapolitan-immigrant childhood in Hell's Kitchen. The emotional material is real — the family structure, the fatalism, the food, the way people talk about respect. The criminal apparatus is largely invented and, as it turned out, invented persuasively enough that real organized crime absorbed it. See Real-World Mafia.

He pitched an outline. Putnam gave him a $5,000 advance. And Paramount bought the film rights off roughly sixty unfinished pages — an option of $12,500 against $80,000. His agent told him to hold out. He needed the money and took it. The book then sold nine million copies in two years, and the film became the biggest ever made.

Puzo's later comment on the deal was that he had been an idiot, and that his one consolation was getting to write the screenplay.

Structure and content¶

The novel runs 1945–1955, opening on the same three petitioners the film opens on — Bonasera the undertaker, Nazorine the baker, Johnny Fontane the singer — and closing with Kay in church lighting candles for Michael's soul.

Roughly two-thirds of it is the story the 1972 film tells. The remaining third is what Coppola cut:

Vito's origin story¶

The Sicilian childhood, the flight to New York, the Fanucci killing, the founding of Genco Pura Olive Oil, the rise. In the novel this is delivered as a long retrospective block. Coppola cut it entirely from the 1972 film — and then filmed most of it as half of Part II, which is why the sequel feels so much like an adaptation despite being an original screenplay.

Johnny Fontane in Hollywood¶

A far larger presence than the film's two scenes. Puzo takes Fontane's career collapse seriously: the ruined voice, the failed marriages, the humiliation of being a middle-aged star nobody wants, and eventually his second act as a producer. There is real feeling in it — Puzo was writing about being 45 and finished, which he believed he was.

It is also the source of the durable and never-substantiated rumor that Fontane is Frank Sinatra. See Johnny Fontane.

Lucy Mancini and Jules Segal¶

The novel's most notorious material. Lucy is a bridesmaid at Connie's wedding and Sonny's mistress; after Sonny's death she moves to Las Vegas, and the book devotes a full subplot to her anatomy, her insecurity about it, and the surgeon who corrects it and falls in love with her.

It is the reason a certain kind of reader remembers The Godfather as a trashy book. Coppola reduced Lucy to a single wordless scene at the wedding and dropped Segal entirely — a decision that improved the film enormously and created a problem eighteen years later, when Part III has to announce that Sonny fathered Vincent on a woman the audience has never met.

The mechanics¶

Puzo explains constantly: how the Commission works, how the political payroll is maintained, why narcotics is a strategic mistake, what a consigliere actually does, how you buy a judge. Coppola dramatized what he could and cut the rest, on the correct instinct that a film should not lecture.

The novel's explanatory instinct is also its unexpected strength — it's the reason the book reads as an account of a business, and the reason Themes has anything to work with at all.

What the novel does better than the film¶

Not much, but not nothing:

Vito's interiority. The book lets you inside Vito's reasoning in a way Brando's performance deliberately refuses. You learn why he refuses narcotics, in strategic detail.
Kay's ending. In the novel Kay converts to Catholicism and prays daily for Michael's soul, which is a bleaker and stranger ending than the film's closing door — a woman who has decided to save a man who doesn't want saving.
Michael in Sicily. More time, more Don Tommasino, and a clearer sense of what the exile does to him.
Sonny. More of him, and more of why the family tolerates him.

Reception¶

Reviews in 1969 were mixed-to-positive and slightly embarrassed. Roger Jellinek in The New York Times called it a voyeur's dream — a skillful fantasy of violent personal power without consequences — which is both a criticism and an unusually precise description of what the book delivers.

The sales were the story: 67 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, over nine million copies in two years, and one of the fastest-selling paperbacks in publishing history. It has since appeared at #53 on PBS's Great American Read list of America's 100 best-loved books and #91 on the BBC's 2003 Big Read.

Its critical standing has slowly improved. The case for it as a serious novel — that it is a book about immigration, assimilation, and the price of American success, wearing a crime novel as a disguise — is easier to make now that its reputation is no longer competing with a fresh memory of the Lucy Mancini chapters.

The cover¶

S. Neil Fujita's design — the title in blackletter above a hand working marionette strings — is one of the most recognizable book jackets ever made. It was carried directly onto the film's posters and has been on every edition and every piece of Godfather merchandising since. Fujita, a Japanese-American designer who was interned during the Second World War and later served in the US Army, also designed the jacket for In Cold Blood.