Mario Puzo - Wikipedia

Look out for that horse's head in your bed !

Thank you my friend Maj Marty Hogan for making us aware that October 15 is the anniversary of the birth of WWII US Army Air Force public relations officer, American author, screenwriter and journalist Mario Gianluigi Puzo who "is known for his crime novels about the Mafia, most notably The Godfather "
"After graduating from the City College of New York, he joined the US Army Air Forces in World War II. Because of his poor eyesight, he was not allowed to undertake combat duties, but he was made a public relations officer stationed in Germany."
Rest in peace Mario Puzo.

Background from nytimes.com/1999/07/03/movies/mario-puzo-author-who-made-the-godfather-a-world-addiction-is-dead-at-78.html
"Mario Puzo, Author Who Made 'The Godfather' a World Addiction, Is Dead at 78
By MEL GUSSOW JULY 3, 1999
Mario Puzo, the best-selling novelist and screenwriter who created ''The Godfather'' and made the Corleones the most famous -- and infamous -- of Mafia families and an enduring myth in American culture, died yesterday at his home in Bay Shore, N.Y. He was 78.
The cause was heart failure, said his agent, Neil Olson, without elaborating.
When Mr. Puzo wrote ''The Godfather'' in the late 1960's, he did it reluctantly. His first two novels had received favorable reviews but had earned him a total of $6,500. At 45 and in debt, he thought he was going downhill fast as a writer. But he had some favorite stories to tell about the Mafia, and for the money, he decided to write a book about Italian-Americans in organized crime. From the author's account, he had scant encouragement from publishers and received an advance of only $5,000. But when the book was published in 1969, it became one of the most phenomenal successes in literary and cinematic history.
The novel was the No. 1 best seller in the United States and was on the New York Times best-seller list for 67 weeks. It was also the most popular novel in England, France, Germany and other countries, and sold more than 21 million copies.
Then it tripled that success when Francis Coppola filmed it. With a screenplay by Mr. Puzo and Mr. Coppola, the film made reputations (for the director, the writer and many of its stars), earned millions of dollars, won Academy Awards for the screenwriters, among others, and became the most quoted movie of its time, with phrases like ''an offer he couldn't refuse'' entering the American lexicon.
The film outdid the book in popularity and in critical respect. When it opened in 1972, Vincent Canby, in his review in The New York Times, called it ''one of the most brutal and moving chronicles of American life ever designed within the limits of popular entertainment.''
Led by Marlon Brando as the patriarchal Don Vito Corleone and Al Pacino as the college-educated son Michael who eventually takes control of the family business, the Corleones edged their way into respectability. The film was far more than a gangster melodrama; it was a sweeping portrait of a family that was as devoted to its own sense of values as to violence. It was also a commentary on greed in a capitalist society.
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the movie's success was that it was repeated again and again, as ''The Godfather'' gave rise to ''The Godfather, Part II'' (1974) and ''The Godfather, Part III'' (1990), both also with screenplays by Mr. Puzo and Mr. Coppola. Playing various Corleones, Mr. Brando, Mr. Pacino and Robert De Niro gave some of their most memorable screen performances, as did Robert Duvall, James Caan and Diane Keaton in other roles. There has been talk of a possible ''Godfather, Part IV,'' tailored to another Italian-American movie star, Leonardo DiCaprio. Mr. Puzo's agent said the author knew nothing of that.
As the Corleones entered mythology, they were surrounded by contradictions. Were they villains or heroes or some hybrid of the two? Don Vito Corleone and his sons were feared and admired, and later they were often parodied. With the help of Mr. Coppola, Mr. Puzo had humanized people who in other fictional and cinematic forms had often been condemned and reviled. The Corleones were, first of all, a family, and there was a bond that extended through the sequels as more and more people throughout the world were touched by their story.
Gangsters Thought He Knew Firsthand
Because of his insights into crime and crime families, it was assumed that Mr. Puzo wrote from firsthand experience. One of the oddities of his career is that when it came to the Mafia, he was very much an outsider. As he wrote in 1972 in ''The Godfather Papers and Other Writings,'' ''I'm ashamed to admit that I wrote 'The Godfather' entirely from research. I never met a real honest-to-God gangster. I knew the gambling world pretty good, but that's all.''
After the book was published, he was introduced to several gangsters who, he said, ''refused to believe that I had never been in the rackets.'' He added, ''But all of them loved the book.'' And later they loved the movie, although the author was sometimes subjected to the charge that ''The Godfather'' was unflattering to Italian-Americans.
Sometimes it seemed as if the person with the strongest doubts was Mr. Puzo. ''I wished like hell I'd written it better,'' he said. ''I wrote below my gifts in that book.'' He preferred his second novel, ''The Fortunate Pilgrim,'' an autobiographical novel about an immigrant Italian-American family in New York. But there was no denying that ''The Godfather'' and the Corleones transformed the author's life and made him one of the most popular and wealthiest of novelists.
Mario Puzo was born in Hell's Kitchen on the west side of Manhattan. His parents were poor Italian-American immigrants from Naples (not, like the Corleones, from Sicily). His father, who was a railroad trackman for the New York Central Railroad, deserted the family when Mario was 12, leaving his wife, Maria, to raise their seven children.
Although there were, of course, gangs on the New York streets, Mr. Puzo stayed clear of them and conformed, he said, to the formidable structure of his family. As he later recalled, his mother often told him to stay home because ''only bad things happen to you outside.'' Mr. Puzo once spoke of his boyhood environment as ''the stone city.''
In a preface to a new edition of his second novel, ''The Fortunate Pilgrim,'' Mr. Puzo said that his mother was the model for Don Corleone, the Godfather (the character played by Mr. Brando and later, at an earlier age, by Mr. De Niro). ''Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth,'' he wrote, ''in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother.'' He said ''The Fortunate Pilgrim'' began as a book about himself but was taken over by the character of Lucia Santa, based on his mother: ''My mother was a wonderful, handsome woman, but a fairly ruthless person.''
In a 1988 television dramatization of ''The Fortunate Pilgrim,'' Lucia Santa was played by Sophia Loren.
He Started Writing While in High School
Mr. Puzo began writing stories in high school and dreamed of making writing his career, but as a young man, in common with his father, he worked for the New York Central Railroad. After serving with the Army in Germany in World War II, he attended the City College of New York on the G.I. Bill and wrote short stories.
At the same time Mr. Puzo was working on his first novel, ''Dark Arena.'' Published in 1955, it dealt with an American veteran of World War II who returns to Germany to look up his former mistress. Nine years later he published ''The Fortunate Pilgrim.'' A reviewer in The New York Times Book Review called it ''a small classic.''
In 1960 Bruce Jay Friedman hired him as an assistant editor of a group of men's magazines (Male, Men, etc.). For those magazines Mr. Puzo wrote action stories, many of them versions of World War II battles.
Recalling Mr. Puzo in those days, Mr. Friedman once wrote that his memories all had to do with ''size -- the size of his appetite'' for food and for reading books: ''I have a picture of him sitting in a chair with not one but six volumes in his lap, wetting his finger and taking 'tastes' of each one.'' He spoke also of the size of Mr. Puzo's laugh, ''always filled with amazement at some quirk of human behavior.''
Still supporting himself and his family (his wife and five children) as a freelance writer, Mr. Puzo began ''The Godfather.'' When the paperback rights to the book were suddenly sold for $410,000, he telephoned his mother. She misunderstood and thought he said $40,000. Three times he told her the real figure, and then she said, ''Don't tell nobody.'' Earlier his mother had been skeptical about his work. After ''The Godfather,'' she called him ''a poet.''
While writing the screenplays for the ''Godfather'' movies with Mr. Coppola and winning two Academy Awards, Mr. Puzo also was a writer on other films (including ''Earthquake,'' ''Superman,'' ''Superman II'' and ''The Cotton Club'') and continued his career as a novelist.
He wrote ''Fools Die'' in 1978 (about gambling in Las Vegas) and sold the paperback rights for $2.55 million. He then returned to some of the themes in ''The Godfather'' with ''The Sicilian'' in 1984. ''The Sicilian'' was filmed by Michael Cimino in 1987. ''The Fourth K'' was a novel about a Kennedy cousin who becomes President of the United States in the next century. ''The Last Don,'' published in 1996, was turned into a six-hour television mini-series the next year.
In 1968 he bought a house on Long Island in Bay Shore and over the years expanded and remodeled it. As a friend, Joseph Heller, said yesterday, ''It was a model house in a development, and he asked them to leave the furniture. He was quiet, modest and unassuming. He never asked a favor, and he always granted a request.'' In at least one respect, he was changed by his success. ''He was always a gambler,'' Mr. Heller said, '''and he gambled for higher stakes.''
'I Fancy Myself An Italian Peasant'
In an interview with Camille Paglia in The Times in 1997, Mr. Puzo said, ''I fancy myself an Italian peasant who's living comfortably on his little farm.'' Four of his five children lived nearby.
After Mr. Puzo's wife, Erika, died in 1978, her nurse, Carol Gino, became his companion. In addition to Ms. Gino, he is survived by his five children: Virginia McLauglin, Eugene, Anthony, Joseph, all of whom live on Long Island, and Dorothy of Los Angeles; nine grandchildren; his sister, Evelyn Murphy, and his brother, Antony Cleri.
Before he died he had completed ''Omerta,'' a novel that Random House plans to publish next summer. He considered this book the third in his Mafia trilogy (after ''The Godfather'' and ''The Last Don'').
In the 1997 Paglia interview, Mr. Puzo said he was ''a Romantic writer'' with ''a sympathy for evil.'' He attributed the popularity of ''The Godfather'' to a ''disenchantment with the American justice system'' as well as a craving for close family ties. ''I hate violence,'' said the father of ''The Godfather.''

Mario Puzo (The Godfather) interview (1996)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUhXdgoEWMg

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Excellent biography share sir.