The Godfather
by Mario Puzo
Summary
Vito Corleone, head of a New York crime family, survives an assassination attempt ordered by the rival narcotics trafficker Virgil Sollozzo, who has moved into heroin against Vito's own wishes and needs him out of the way. Vito's youngest son Michael, a decorated war veteran who has kept his distance from the family business, kills Sollozzo and a corrupt police captain protecting him in a restaurant, then flees to Sicily while his hot tempered older brother Sonny takes over as acting boss. Sonny is lured into an ambush at a highway tollbooth by their sister Connie's abusive husband Carlo and gunned down, a loss that draws Vito back from retirement to negotiate an uneasy truce among New York's five families rather than continue the war. Michael returns from exile, marries Kay Adams, and steps into leadership once Vito dies of a heart attack in his own tomato garden, inheriting a family Vito had always hoped he would stay out of entirely. Michael repays every debt at once: during his own nephew's baptism he has the heads of the rival families and his own disloyal brother in law Carlo killed in a single coordinated afternoon, then moves the family's operations toward legitimate seeming casino business in Las Vegas. The novel ends with Kay, having finally learned what her husband has actually become, staying with him regardless and praying in a nearby church for a soul she suspects may already be beyond saving.
Puzo builds the book on the same two engines that made it a phenomenon: operatic, carefully staged violence and closely observed procedural detail about how an organized crime family actually functions, financially and socially, which Puzo researched almost entirely from newspaper clippings and courtroom transcripts rather than any personal underworld connections he never had. It reads fast, built for momentum over subtlety, and some readers find its digressions, particularly a much mocked passage on one character's anatomy, overwrought next to the family loyalty and code of honor that keeps genuinely pulling readers back in.
Historical Context & Significance
No literary prize marked The Godfather's release. Puzo was in his mid forties, twenty thousand dollars in debt after two well reviewed but poorly selling literary novels, when Putnam gave him a five thousand dollar advance specifically to write something commercial; he told friends outright that this book was written for money rather than art. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for sixty seven weeks and sold more than nine million copies within two years. Roger Jellinek, reviewing it, described it as a voyeur's dream, a skillful fantasy of violent personal power without consequences.
Its lasting honors belong mostly to Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 film rather than to the novel itself. Paramount had bought the rights for eighty thousand dollars before the book's full popularity hit, and the finished film won the Academy Award for Best Picture, with Marlon Brando winning Best Actor and Puzo sharing the Best Adapted Screenplay award with Coppola. The film now ranks second on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest American films, a reputation the book that started it has never quite matched on its own.