Mario Puzo (1920-99) was one of 12 children born in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen to two illiterate Neapolitan immigrants. Puzo graduated from City College, loved the novels of Dostoyevsky and in his 20s began writing stories for pulp magazines. He published two little-noticed novels, and then, in his late 30s, deeply in debt (he gambled) and with a wife and five children, he set out for entirely mercenary reasons to write a novel about the Mafia, an organization about which he knew almost nothing.
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