Mario Pyuzo

Mario Puzo was an American writer of Italian origin, critic, screenwriter, and novelist.

He was born on October 15, 1920, in New York City to a family of Italian immigrants. During World War II, he served in units of the U.S. Air Force in East Asia and in Germany. He studied at the New School for Social Research in New York and at Columbia University.

For about twenty years, he worked in U.S. government agencies in New York and abroad. In 1963, he began working as a freelance journalist and became a professional writer.

Mario Puzo's first book, The Dark Arena, was published in 1955. The novel is set in postwar Germany. At its center is the love story of American soldier Walter Mosca, waiting for his unit to return to the United States, and a German girl, Hella. His next novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, published in 1965, is devoted to the hard life of Italian immigrants in the United States during the Great Depression. In Russia, these two books by Mario Puzo were first published in the 1990s.

The writer gained wide fame with the 1969 novel The Godfather, about the roots and laws of honor of the Italian mafia, corruption, violence, and the noble gangster Don Corleone. In the 1970s, the novel became a bestseller. In 1972, filmmaker Francis F. Coppola made a film of the same name based on Mario Puzo's work, for which Puzo himself wrote the screenplay.

He died of heart failure on July 2, 1999, at the age of 79 in his own home in Bay Shore, Long Island. Mario Puzo's novel Omerta was published in 2000 after the author's death; his final novel, The Family, remained unfinished.