Mario Before the Mob

It is a major part of Mario Puzo’s story about himself, the myth of The Godfather if you will, that before writing this piece of trash he wrote literature. ‘I have written three novels. The Godfather is not as good as the preceding two; I wrote it to make money.’ He says The Dark Arena (1955) ‘received mostly very good reviews saying I was a writer to watch’ and that The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965) ‘received some extraordinarily fine reviews. The New York Times called it a “small classic” – that he himself immodestly thinks of it as art. So pervasive is Puzo’s myth that when I got in touch with another writer and mentioned I was writing about ‘The Godfather’ he replied that he’d been meaning to read ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ because that was the great book Puzo wrote before he condescended to write for money. Puzo concludes his lamentation about ‘The Godfather’: ‘The book got much better reviews than I expected. I wished like hell I’d written it better. I like the book. It has energy and I lucked out by creating a central character that was popularly accepted as genuinely mythic. But I wrote below my gifts in that book.’