ABSTRACT
The background to The Godfather is well known and blatantly self-proclaimed. Puzo wrote two ‘literary’ novels which were well received (The New York Times’s ‘small classic’ is a phrase which stuck in the proud author’s mind), but which netted only $6,500 between them. ‘I was forty-five years old and tired of being an artist…. It was time to grow up and sell out’ (Puzo, 1972, p. 34). Publishers had shown some interest in ‘that Mafia stuff’ in his second novel, which dealt principally with the struggle of an Italian immigrant family. So Puzo drew up the outline of a full-blown gangster saga set in the 1940s New York, and loosely based on folk demons like ‘Uncle Frank’ Costello. Those ten pages earned him $5,000 advance from Putnam. This was 1965; Puzo, who seems by his own account to be a hand-to-mouth sort of writer, finally delivered the manuscript in 1968, spurred by the need for some money to take his family on holiday. While he was away, paperback rights were auctioned to Bantam for a then record $410,000. Once published The Godfather assumed the #1 spot on the New York Times list, and held a place in the top ten titles for sixty-seven weeks. It was also number one in England, France and Germany; countries where, perhaps, interest in ‘gangster’ America was heightened by the Vietnam war. They tell me’, Puzo wrote in 1972, ‘it’s the fastest and bestselling fiction paperback of all times’ (Puzo, 1972, p. 40). By 1978 it was one of the select half-dozen novels to have broken the 10 m. sales barrier in the US, and is credited by Hackett as being the bestselling novel ever. By the end of the decade The Godfather’s publishers were claiming worldwide sales of over 15 m.
