Publication Order of The Godfather Books
| The Godfather | 1969 |
| The Sicilian | 1984 |
Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| The Dark Arena | 1955 |
| The Fortunate Pilgrim | 1965 |
| The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw | 1966 |
| Six Graves to Munich | 1967 |
| Fools Die | 1978 |
| The Fourth K | 1990 |
| The Last Don | 1996 |
| Omertà | 2000 |
| The Family (With: Carol Gino) | 2001 |
Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books
| The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions | 1972 |
| Inside Las Vegas | 1977 |
About Mario Puzo
Mario Puzo (1920 to 1999) was an American novelist and screenwriter best known for “The Godfather” (1969), his novel about a New York Mafia family. He co-wrote the screenplays for the three films that Francis Ford Coppola made from it and won two Academy Awards for them.
Puzo was born on 15 October 1920 in the Hell’s Kitchen district of Manhattan to Italian immigrants from the province of Avellino. His father, a trackman for the New York Central Railroad, was committed to a psychiatric hospital when Puzo was twelve, leaving his mother to raise seven children. He graduated from the City College of New York and served with the United States Army Air Forces in Germany during the Second World War.
His first published story appeared in 1950 and his first novel, “The Dark Arena”, in 1955. “The Fortunate Pilgrim” followed in 1965. During the 1960s he worked as an assistant editor on a group of men’s pulp magazines and wrote war adventure pieces under the pen name Mario Cleri. One of those stories was expanded into the novel “Six Graves to Munich” (1967).
Puzo said that “The Godfather” came from research into organised crime, not from personal experience, and that he set out to write a book with wide popular appeal. It stayed on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold more than nine million copies in two years. Paramount had optioned the unfinished manuscript, and the 1972 film brought Puzo the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. He won the same award for “The Godfather Part II” (1974) and worked with Coppola again on “The Godfather Part III” (1990).
His other screen work includes the original screenplay for “Superman” (1978), which also supplied the plot of “Superman II”. Later novels include “Fools Die” (1978), “The Sicilian” (1984), which was filmed in 1987, “The Fourth K”, about a fictional member of the Kennedy family who becomes president, and “The Last Don” (1996), which became a television miniseries.
Puzo died of heart failure at his home in West Bay Shore, New York, on 2 July 1999. Two novels appeared after his death: “Omertà” in 2000 and “The Family”, a novel about Pope Alexander VI and the Borgias that was completed by his partner Carol Gino, in 2001.
Photo: Bernard Gotfryd (Library of Congress), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).