About the Author

The son of Italian immigrants who moved to the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City, Mario Puzo was born on October 15, 1920. After World War II, during which he served as a U.S. Army corporal, he attended City College of New York on the G.I. Bill and worked as a freelance writer. During this period he wrote his first two novels The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965).

When his books made little money despite being critically acclaimed, he vowed to write a bestseller. The Godfather (1969) was an enormous success. He collaborated with director Francis Ford Coppola on the screenplays for all three Godfather movies and won Academy Awards for both The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather, Part II (1974). He also collaborated on the scripts for such films as Superman (1978), Superman II (1981), and The Cotton Club (1984). He continued to write phenomenally successful novels, Including Fools Die (1978), The Sicilian (1984), The Fourth K (1991), and The Last Don (1996). Mario Puzo died on July 2, 1999. His final novel, Omerta, was published in 2000.

Reviews

“A staggering triumph...The definitive novel about a sinister fraternity of crime.”—The Saturday Review

“You can’t stop reading it, and you’ll find it hard to stop dreaming about it.”—New York Magazine

The deck's stacked against this audio adaptation of the novel that inspired one of the most acclaimed feature films of all time. The powerful visual imagery at the end of Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation of Puzo's novel-the alternating between a baptism and coordinated hits on rival mob bosses-is so indelible that any other depiction must suffer in comparison. Hearing any narrator read that a character "put three bullets" in another's chest just can't hold a candle to seeing it, at least as Coppola filmed the scene. Ditto for the shocker when a certain animal head turns up in a certain character's bed. However, that's not to say that narrator Joe Mantegna's reading is at fault. Turning in compelling and nuanced performance, Mantegna's gravelly-voiced Don Corleone is close enough to Marlon Brando's not to jar, and the narrator (who appeared in The Godfather: Part III) also pulls off female voices effectively. More notably, despite his decades of voicing a parodistic mobster on The Simpsons, Mantegna's use of different accents and modes of speech insures that his characterizations never come across as stereotypical. A Signet paperback. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"A staggering triumph...The definitive novel about a sinister fraternity of crime."-The Saturday Review

"You can't stop reading it, and you'll find it hard to stop dreaming about it."-New York Magazine