This year, Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal film The Godfather celebrates its 50th anniversary. It is regularly hailed as the greatest picture ever made, and is deeply imbued within pop culture, from the dialogue (“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse”; “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns”) to the iconic performances from Marlon Brando as the titular crime boss Don Vito Corleone, Al Pacino as his son and heir Michael, Diane Keaton as his girlfriend Kay, and James Caan as Vito’s impetuous eldest son Sonny. 

Many moments have been so imitated and parodied as to be almost cliched (the horse’s head in the bed; Sonny’s demise at the toll booth; the mass killings at the end) but it remains a masterpiece that only grows in stature and power as the decades pass. 

Coppola is often seen as the auteur of the film, but this ignores the significant contribution of Mario Puzo, who wrote the best-selling novel on which it is based. Puzo was born in 1920 in the tough Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City, the son of Italian immigrants. It was a grim, frightening place, full of noise, poverty and anger. As he later wrote: “I never heard an Italian singing. None of the grown-ups I knew were charming or loving or understanding… rather they seemed coarse, vulgar and insulting.” 

He was determined to escape this uncongenial milieu by becoming an artist or a writer – “Even as a very small child I dreaded growing up to be like the adults around me” – and decided: “I would be rich, famous, happy. I would master my destiny.” His mother believed that the height of his hopes was to become a railroad clerk; it was not until he published The Godfather in 1969 that she conceded that she might have been conservative in her aspirations for her son.  

After a brief stint working on the railroad (“I was flung into Hell,” he later said), Puzo served in the army in the Second World War, before starting to write in 1950. His first novel, The Dark Arena, appeared five years later. 

He then began a modestly successful career, but by the late Sixties, Puzo was beginning to despair. As he said: “I still dreamed of future glory. I still knew I would be a good writer, but I was beginning to realise that accidents could happen and my second choice, that of being a great criminal, was coming up fast.” Yet he did not embrace criminality. Instead, he created perhaps the 20th century’s most iconic fictional crime dynasty: the Corleone family. 

He did not believe that the book was especially accomplished. As he said candidly: “The Godfather is not as good as the preceding two [novels]; I wrote it to make money.” His first two books had been critically acclaimed but had not sold, but an editor remarked that, had his second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, had a greater emphasis on the minor character of a mafia boss, it would have been popular. Puzo was in his mid-40s, broke and bitter. 

He decided that he would sell out, if that is what the market required, and wrote a ten-page outline to titillate his publisher. They were uninterested, but Puzo saw this rejection as a seminal moment. As he said: “I had been naïve enough to believe that publishers cared about art. They didn’t. They wanted to make money.”