Creator David Chase was a student at Stanford when Puzo’s novel came out. ario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather was on the bestseller list for 67 weeks, selling more than 21 million copies worldwide. “I made it up. published 1999, avg rating 3.81 — Mario Puzo was one of the well known authors from America who has written some very popular novels based on the crime fiction genre.
141 ratings —
20,342 ratings — 3,354 ratings — And he said, ‘Would you like a rug?’ So she sent my brother to get the rug, and my brother didn’t realise the guy was stealing the rug until he took out the gun when the cop came. Puzo showed a 10-page outline for his novel about the Corleone crime family to Atheneum, who turned it down instantly. Although overweight and an excessive eater – he loved Chinese food and fine Italian cuisine – he was a talented tennis player and had a court built in his large garden. 3,205 ratings — “Like the Don, she could be extremely warm and extremely ruthless,” was his revealing answer to The New York Times.
Although he was doing well at Commerce High School, the need for money meant he was forced to leave at 15 to work as a switchboard attendant for the railways. A disbelieving Puzo asked Targ if this was “some kind of Madison Avenue put-on”. It was a big fire.”, Puzo’s upbringing inspired much of The Godfather, including the scene in which Vito disposes of a gun on a roof. The first novel, The Godfather, written by Mario Puzo, was released in 1969. published 1986, avg rating 4.25 — “A man's primary duty in life is to earn his own living, but to what purpose if he did not have a wife and children?”, avg rating 4.36 — When Coppola was battling Paramount to hire Brando, Puzo wrote to the actor suggesting he “used his muscle” to land the part of Vito.
It was adapted into three feature films, which became one of the most acclaimed franchises in film history.
Puzo was born 100 years ago, on 15 October 1920, in the west Manhattan area known as “Hell’s Kitchen”. “On the first page, it said, ‘The best screenplay ever written was The Godfather.’ After he read that, he threw the book away.”.
Error rating book. Within days, Targ told Puzo he had sold the paperback rights to Signet for $400,000, an unheard-of figure at the time. 15,612 ratings —
Puzo said that eight publishers in all rejected The Godfather. Puzo remained “addicted” to reading, sometimes for 16 hours a day, and often had 20 books on the go consecutively. “When I wrote the scene of Clemenza describing how to make a tomato sauce, I said, ‘Well, first, you brown some sausage and then you blah, blah, blah.’ And the note from Mario said, ‘Francis, gangsters don’t brown, gangsters fry.’ It’s true, you know, gangsters would never say brown.” The pair also agreed on casting choices. She scared me so much that when I was in the eighth grade and got a bad report card, I changed the marks.
“My brother would bring home a bad report card. Although Puzo was self-critical about the book’s lack of artistic merit – “The Godfather is not as good as the preceding two novels, I wrote it to make money” – it was a sensational hit from the moment it appeared in bookstores on 10 March 1969.
I realised the teacher would notice, so I stayed after school and set a fire to burn up her desk and the report card. 0 ratings — Read 711 reviews from the world's largest community for readers.
2,259 ratings — Yet his timeless tale is so much more than a gangster melodrama; it is a remarkable dissection of the immigrant experience and a biting commentary on greed. “This was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone,” Puzo noted drolly. Puzo wrote “half a script” telling the story of Sonny Corleone (brilliantly played by James Caan), but it was stymied because Paramount owned the rights.
333,859 ratings — In his memoir, Puzo said that his elder sister Evelyn was the family enforcer. One project that went unfulfilled was the movie The Godfather Part IV. And his best lines – such as “Never hate your enemies, it affects your judgment”, or the poetic “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” – remain classics, part of why Puzo deserves to be celebrated as one of the 20th century’s most gifted storytellers. He sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures for a down-payment of $12,500 and a flat fee of $75,000 if the film was made, ignoring his agent’s warning to wait.
91,313 ratings —
published 1990, avg rating 3.36 —
It’s a good gambling game,” Heller told Playboy in 1975. That’s a Mafia decision.”. Puzo’s escape from grim reality was the 11th Avenue public library, where he enjoyed reading about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Then he came and got back his guns. 11,025 ratings —
Although The Fortunate Pilgrim, an autobiographical story about the Italian immigrant experience, was praised by The New York Times as “a small classic”, it sold only 4,000 copies and left him struggling to support his wife and five children.
“I never met a real honest-to-god gangster.
That’s almost entirely in the book and in the movie.”. Paramount hired 32-year-old Francis Ford Coppola to direct the movie and co-write the screenplay.
“I was going downhill fast… I was 45 and tired of being an artist,” Puzo wrote in his memoir. Puzo’s confidence masked insecurities, though, and he later admitted to Rose that if The Godfather had not been a success, “I don’t think I would have written another book”.
Puzo’s screenplay for the 1972 film adaptation, arguably the defining portrait of the Mafia in the 20th century, contained some of cinema’s most memorable lines – “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” among them – and introduced the Italian words consigliere, capo and omerta into the popular vocabulary. Books … Among his favourite novelists were John Le Carre, Larry McMurty and “English lady novelists” Faye Weldon and Muriel Spark (who was actually born in Edinburgh).
published 1978, avg rating 3.85 — published 2004, avg rating 3.90 — “The worst thing he called me was a pimp.” Sinatra told Puzo that he would like “to beat the hell” out of him, hissing “choke, go ahead and choke” as the “humiliated” author left the restaurant. “The first Godfather is in the best 20 movies of all time – I don’t think you could say that about the book,” he remarked. Puzo came up with the film’s famous line about an offer you can’t refuse. Puzo was 78 when he died of heart failure on 2 July 1999. On the spot, Bill Targ handed Puzo a $5,000 advance. He would have been a burden on the family.
The success of the first two Godfather films (1974’s Part II, also starring Al Pacino and Diane Keaton, was a $100m success for Paramount) turned Puzo into an in-demand screenwriter – and he made a small fortune co-scripting two Superman movies and The Cotton Club.
30,025 ratings —
The character of the all-powerful Don Vito Corleone – portrayed first by Marlon Brando and later as a young man in The Godfather Part II by Robert De Niro – was actually modelled on Puzo’s Naples-born mother, Maria. Puzo retreated to a small basement room in his New York house and started hammering out plotlines on a 1965 Olympia typewriter, occasionally admonishing his children about noise. 2,026 ratings — “I was just ready for that book,” Chase said in 2002. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. They had to evacuate the building. This was followed by 1996’s The Last Don, a return to Mafia-based fiction, which was turned into a television mini-series starring Daryl Hannah and KD Lang. published 2001, avg rating 3.72 — The Godfather book series is a series of crime novels about Italian-American Mafia families, most notably the fictional Corleone family, led by Don Vito Corleone and later his son Michael Corleone. He is known for his crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 8 ratings — “I wrote below my gifts in The Godfather… I wished like hell I’d written it better.”. Puzo was a heavy cigar smoker for years, something that helped bring on chronic diabetes and the 1995 heart attack that made walking difficult and forced him to install an elevator in his house. Their only real dispute came during the making of The Godfather Part II, when they disagreed about the fate of Fredo Corleone (played by John Cazale). 233 ratings —
Creator David Chase was a student at Stanford when Puzo’s novel came out. ario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather was on the bestseller list for 67 weeks, selling more than 21 million copies worldwide. “I made it up. published 1999, avg rating 3.81 — Mario Puzo was one of the well known authors from America who has written some very popular novels based on the crime fiction genre.
141 ratings —
20,342 ratings — 3,354 ratings — And he said, ‘Would you like a rug?’ So she sent my brother to get the rug, and my brother didn’t realise the guy was stealing the rug until he took out the gun when the cop came. Puzo showed a 10-page outline for his novel about the Corleone crime family to Atheneum, who turned it down instantly. Although overweight and an excessive eater – he loved Chinese food and fine Italian cuisine – he was a talented tennis player and had a court built in his large garden. 3,205 ratings — “Like the Don, she could be extremely warm and extremely ruthless,” was his revealing answer to The New York Times.
Although he was doing well at Commerce High School, the need for money meant he was forced to leave at 15 to work as a switchboard attendant for the railways. A disbelieving Puzo asked Targ if this was “some kind of Madison Avenue put-on”. It was a big fire.”, Puzo’s upbringing inspired much of The Godfather, including the scene in which Vito disposes of a gun on a roof. The first novel, The Godfather, written by Mario Puzo, was released in 1969. published 1986, avg rating 4.25 — “A man's primary duty in life is to earn his own living, but to what purpose if he did not have a wife and children?”, avg rating 4.36 — When Coppola was battling Paramount to hire Brando, Puzo wrote to the actor suggesting he “used his muscle” to land the part of Vito.
It was adapted into three feature films, which became one of the most acclaimed franchises in film history.
Puzo was born 100 years ago, on 15 October 1920, in the west Manhattan area known as “Hell’s Kitchen”. “On the first page, it said, ‘The best screenplay ever written was The Godfather.’ After he read that, he threw the book away.”.
Error rating book. Within days, Targ told Puzo he had sold the paperback rights to Signet for $400,000, an unheard-of figure at the time. 15,612 ratings —
Puzo said that eight publishers in all rejected The Godfather. Puzo remained “addicted” to reading, sometimes for 16 hours a day, and often had 20 books on the go consecutively. “When I wrote the scene of Clemenza describing how to make a tomato sauce, I said, ‘Well, first, you brown some sausage and then you blah, blah, blah.’ And the note from Mario said, ‘Francis, gangsters don’t brown, gangsters fry.’ It’s true, you know, gangsters would never say brown.” The pair also agreed on casting choices. She scared me so much that when I was in the eighth grade and got a bad report card, I changed the marks.
“My brother would bring home a bad report card. Although Puzo was self-critical about the book’s lack of artistic merit – “The Godfather is not as good as the preceding two novels, I wrote it to make money” – it was a sensational hit from the moment it appeared in bookstores on 10 March 1969.
I realised the teacher would notice, so I stayed after school and set a fire to burn up her desk and the report card. 0 ratings — Read 711 reviews from the world's largest community for readers.
2,259 ratings — Yet his timeless tale is so much more than a gangster melodrama; it is a remarkable dissection of the immigrant experience and a biting commentary on greed. “This was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone,” Puzo noted drolly. Puzo wrote “half a script” telling the story of Sonny Corleone (brilliantly played by James Caan), but it was stymied because Paramount owned the rights.
333,859 ratings — In his memoir, Puzo said that his elder sister Evelyn was the family enforcer. One project that went unfulfilled was the movie The Godfather Part IV. And his best lines – such as “Never hate your enemies, it affects your judgment”, or the poetic “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” – remain classics, part of why Puzo deserves to be celebrated as one of the 20th century’s most gifted storytellers. He sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures for a down-payment of $12,500 and a flat fee of $75,000 if the film was made, ignoring his agent’s warning to wait.
91,313 ratings —
published 1990, avg rating 3.36 —
It’s a good gambling game,” Heller told Playboy in 1975. That’s a Mafia decision.”. Puzo’s escape from grim reality was the 11th Avenue public library, where he enjoyed reading about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Then he came and got back his guns. 11,025 ratings —
Although The Fortunate Pilgrim, an autobiographical story about the Italian immigrant experience, was praised by The New York Times as “a small classic”, it sold only 4,000 copies and left him struggling to support his wife and five children.
“I never met a real honest-to-god gangster.
That’s almost entirely in the book and in the movie.”. Paramount hired 32-year-old Francis Ford Coppola to direct the movie and co-write the screenplay.
“I was going downhill fast… I was 45 and tired of being an artist,” Puzo wrote in his memoir. Puzo’s confidence masked insecurities, though, and he later admitted to Rose that if The Godfather had not been a success, “I don’t think I would have written another book”.
Puzo’s screenplay for the 1972 film adaptation, arguably the defining portrait of the Mafia in the 20th century, contained some of cinema’s most memorable lines – “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” among them – and introduced the Italian words consigliere, capo and omerta into the popular vocabulary. Books … Among his favourite novelists were John Le Carre, Larry McMurty and “English lady novelists” Faye Weldon and Muriel Spark (who was actually born in Edinburgh).
published 1978, avg rating 3.85 — published 2004, avg rating 3.90 — “The worst thing he called me was a pimp.” Sinatra told Puzo that he would like “to beat the hell” out of him, hissing “choke, go ahead and choke” as the “humiliated” author left the restaurant. “The first Godfather is in the best 20 movies of all time – I don’t think you could say that about the book,” he remarked. Puzo came up with the film’s famous line about an offer you can’t refuse. Puzo was 78 when he died of heart failure on 2 July 1999. On the spot, Bill Targ handed Puzo a $5,000 advance. He would have been a burden on the family.
The success of the first two Godfather films (1974’s Part II, also starring Al Pacino and Diane Keaton, was a $100m success for Paramount) turned Puzo into an in-demand screenwriter – and he made a small fortune co-scripting two Superman movies and The Cotton Club.
30,025 ratings —
The character of the all-powerful Don Vito Corleone – portrayed first by Marlon Brando and later as a young man in The Godfather Part II by Robert De Niro – was actually modelled on Puzo’s Naples-born mother, Maria. Puzo retreated to a small basement room in his New York house and started hammering out plotlines on a 1965 Olympia typewriter, occasionally admonishing his children about noise. 2,026 ratings — “I was just ready for that book,” Chase said in 2002. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. They had to evacuate the building. This was followed by 1996’s The Last Don, a return to Mafia-based fiction, which was turned into a television mini-series starring Daryl Hannah and KD Lang. published 2001, avg rating 3.72 — The Godfather book series is a series of crime novels about Italian-American Mafia families, most notably the fictional Corleone family, led by Don Vito Corleone and later his son Michael Corleone. He is known for his crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 8 ratings — “I wrote below my gifts in The Godfather… I wished like hell I’d written it better.”. Puzo was a heavy cigar smoker for years, something that helped bring on chronic diabetes and the 1995 heart attack that made walking difficult and forced him to install an elevator in his house. Their only real dispute came during the making of The Godfather Part II, when they disagreed about the fate of Fredo Corleone (played by John Cazale). 233 ratings —
He was once so engrossed in a Dostoyevsky novel that he forgot to change the signals, bringing all the local trains to a standstill. I wrote memos on how we could plant that line, because I was sure it would become a famous line, one of those lines that people would always be using,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross in 1996.
“I really thought I would spend the rest of my life as a railroad clerk,” said Puzo, who signed up to fight in the Second World War.
published, avg rating 4.29 — Puzo thought some of the popularity of his book was down to a “disenchantment with the American justice system”. After …
MARIO PUZO (1920-1999) Mario Puzo spent the last three years of his life writing Omerta (2000), the concluding installment in his saga about power and morality in America. The reaction from other mob bosses to the film was glowing.
He began by penning pulp stories for men’s magazines – sometimes using the name Mario Cleri – before releasing his first novel, 1955’s The Dark Arena, which was set in occupied Germany. 13,335 ratings — published 1977, avg rating 3.70 — But bad things happened inside that tiny “slum”. Mario Puzo was born October 15, 1920, in "Hell's Kitchen" on Manhattan's (NY) West Side and, following military service in World War II, attended New York's New School for Social Research and Columbia University. 1,815 ratings — Puzo faced wider complaints that his characters were a stereotype of Italian criminality. He sold the paperback rights for $2.5m. published 2013, avg rating 4.18 — Puzo also worked on The Family (2004) -- about the infamous Borgias of 15th Century Rome -- for two decades before his death. We made a justified decision, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/mario-puzo-at-100-the-godfather-author-never-met-a-real-gangster-but-his-mafia-melodrama-remains-timeless-b863424.html.
Creator David Chase was a student at Stanford when Puzo’s novel came out. ario Puzo’s 1969 novel The Godfather was on the bestseller list for 67 weeks, selling more than 21 million copies worldwide. “I made it up. published 1999, avg rating 3.81 — Mario Puzo was one of the well known authors from America who has written some very popular novels based on the crime fiction genre.
141 ratings —
20,342 ratings — 3,354 ratings — And he said, ‘Would you like a rug?’ So she sent my brother to get the rug, and my brother didn’t realise the guy was stealing the rug until he took out the gun when the cop came. Puzo showed a 10-page outline for his novel about the Corleone crime family to Atheneum, who turned it down instantly. Although overweight and an excessive eater – he loved Chinese food and fine Italian cuisine – he was a talented tennis player and had a court built in his large garden. 3,205 ratings — “Like the Don, she could be extremely warm and extremely ruthless,” was his revealing answer to The New York Times.
Although he was doing well at Commerce High School, the need for money meant he was forced to leave at 15 to work as a switchboard attendant for the railways. A disbelieving Puzo asked Targ if this was “some kind of Madison Avenue put-on”. It was a big fire.”, Puzo’s upbringing inspired much of The Godfather, including the scene in which Vito disposes of a gun on a roof. The first novel, The Godfather, written by Mario Puzo, was released in 1969. published 1986, avg rating 4.25 — “A man's primary duty in life is to earn his own living, but to what purpose if he did not have a wife and children?”, avg rating 4.36 — When Coppola was battling Paramount to hire Brando, Puzo wrote to the actor suggesting he “used his muscle” to land the part of Vito.
It was adapted into three feature films, which became one of the most acclaimed franchises in film history.
Puzo was born 100 years ago, on 15 October 1920, in the west Manhattan area known as “Hell’s Kitchen”. “On the first page, it said, ‘The best screenplay ever written was The Godfather.’ After he read that, he threw the book away.”.
Error rating book. Within days, Targ told Puzo he had sold the paperback rights to Signet for $400,000, an unheard-of figure at the time. 15,612 ratings —
Puzo said that eight publishers in all rejected The Godfather. Puzo remained “addicted” to reading, sometimes for 16 hours a day, and often had 20 books on the go consecutively. “When I wrote the scene of Clemenza describing how to make a tomato sauce, I said, ‘Well, first, you brown some sausage and then you blah, blah, blah.’ And the note from Mario said, ‘Francis, gangsters don’t brown, gangsters fry.’ It’s true, you know, gangsters would never say brown.” The pair also agreed on casting choices. She scared me so much that when I was in the eighth grade and got a bad report card, I changed the marks.
“My brother would bring home a bad report card. Although Puzo was self-critical about the book’s lack of artistic merit – “The Godfather is not as good as the preceding two novels, I wrote it to make money” – it was a sensational hit from the moment it appeared in bookstores on 10 March 1969.
I realised the teacher would notice, so I stayed after school and set a fire to burn up her desk and the report card. 0 ratings — Read 711 reviews from the world's largest community for readers.
2,259 ratings — Yet his timeless tale is so much more than a gangster melodrama; it is a remarkable dissection of the immigrant experience and a biting commentary on greed. “This was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone,” Puzo noted drolly. Puzo wrote “half a script” telling the story of Sonny Corleone (brilliantly played by James Caan), but it was stymied because Paramount owned the rights.
333,859 ratings — In his memoir, Puzo said that his elder sister Evelyn was the family enforcer. One project that went unfulfilled was the movie The Godfather Part IV. And his best lines – such as “Never hate your enemies, it affects your judgment”, or the poetic “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” – remain classics, part of why Puzo deserves to be celebrated as one of the 20th century’s most gifted storytellers. He sold the film rights to Paramount Pictures for a down-payment of $12,500 and a flat fee of $75,000 if the film was made, ignoring his agent’s warning to wait.
91,313 ratings —
published 1990, avg rating 3.36 —
It’s a good gambling game,” Heller told Playboy in 1975. That’s a Mafia decision.”. Puzo’s escape from grim reality was the 11th Avenue public library, where he enjoyed reading about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
Then he came and got back his guns. 11,025 ratings —
Although The Fortunate Pilgrim, an autobiographical story about the Italian immigrant experience, was praised by The New York Times as “a small classic”, it sold only 4,000 copies and left him struggling to support his wife and five children.
“I never met a real honest-to-god gangster.
That’s almost entirely in the book and in the movie.”. Paramount hired 32-year-old Francis Ford Coppola to direct the movie and co-write the screenplay.
“I was going downhill fast… I was 45 and tired of being an artist,” Puzo wrote in his memoir. Puzo’s confidence masked insecurities, though, and he later admitted to Rose that if The Godfather had not been a success, “I don’t think I would have written another book”.
Puzo’s screenplay for the 1972 film adaptation, arguably the defining portrait of the Mafia in the 20th century, contained some of cinema’s most memorable lines – “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse” among them – and introduced the Italian words consigliere, capo and omerta into the popular vocabulary. Books … Among his favourite novelists were John Le Carre, Larry McMurty and “English lady novelists” Faye Weldon and Muriel Spark (who was actually born in Edinburgh).
published 1978, avg rating 3.85 — published 2004, avg rating 3.90 — “The worst thing he called me was a pimp.” Sinatra told Puzo that he would like “to beat the hell” out of him, hissing “choke, go ahead and choke” as the “humiliated” author left the restaurant. “The first Godfather is in the best 20 movies of all time – I don’t think you could say that about the book,” he remarked. Puzo came up with the film’s famous line about an offer you can’t refuse. Puzo was 78 when he died of heart failure on 2 July 1999. On the spot, Bill Targ handed Puzo a $5,000 advance. He would have been a burden on the family.
The success of the first two Godfather films (1974’s Part II, also starring Al Pacino and Diane Keaton, was a $100m success for Paramount) turned Puzo into an in-demand screenwriter – and he made a small fortune co-scripting two Superman movies and The Cotton Club.
30,025 ratings —
The character of the all-powerful Don Vito Corleone – portrayed first by Marlon Brando and later as a young man in The Godfather Part II by Robert De Niro – was actually modelled on Puzo’s Naples-born mother, Maria. Puzo retreated to a small basement room in his New York house and started hammering out plotlines on a 1965 Olympia typewriter, occasionally admonishing his children about noise. 2,026 ratings — “I was just ready for that book,” Chase said in 2002. Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. They had to evacuate the building. This was followed by 1996’s The Last Don, a return to Mafia-based fiction, which was turned into a television mini-series starring Daryl Hannah and KD Lang. published 2001, avg rating 3.72 — The Godfather book series is a series of crime novels about Italian-American Mafia families, most notably the fictional Corleone family, led by Don Vito Corleone and later his son Michael Corleone. He is known for his crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 8 ratings — “I wrote below my gifts in The Godfather… I wished like hell I’d written it better.”. Puzo was a heavy cigar smoker for years, something that helped bring on chronic diabetes and the 1995 heart attack that made walking difficult and forced him to install an elevator in his house. Their only real dispute came during the making of The Godfather Part II, when they disagreed about the fate of Fredo Corleone (played by John Cazale). 233 ratings —