Mario Puzo served in the United States Army Air Forces in Germany in World War II, and later graduated from the City College of New York.[4] Puzo married a German woman, Erika Lina Broske, with whom he had five children.[5] When Erika died of breast cancer at the age of 57 in 1978, her nurse, Carol Gino, became Puzo's companion.[4][5]
In 1950, Puzo's first short story, "The Last Christmas," was published in American Vanguard and republished in the 1953 anthology New Voices: American Writing Today #1.[6][7] After the war, he wrote his first book, the novel The Dark Arena, which was published in 1955.[4]
In 1960, Bruce Jay Friedman hired Puzo as an assistant editor of a group of men's pulp magazines with titles such as Male, Men. Under the pen name Mario Cleri, Puzo wrote World War II adventure features for magazine True Action.[8][9] A November 1965 short story, "Six Graves to Munich", was expanded into a novel in October 1967, and adapted into a film in 1982.[10][11]
In 1969, Puzo's best-known work, The Godfather, was published. Puzo stated that this story came from research into organized crime, not from personal experience, and that he was looking to write something that would have wide popular appeal.[4][12] The novel remained on The New York Times Best Seller list for 67 weeks and sold over nine million copies in two years.[13] The book was later developed into the film The Godfather (1972), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures originally found out about Puzo's novel in 1967 when a literary scout for the company contacted then Paramount Vice President of Production Peter Bart about Puzo's unfinished sixty-page manuscript.[14] Bart believed the work was "much beyond a Mafia story" and offered Puzo a $12,500 option for the work, with an option for $80,000 if the finished work were made into a film.[14][15] Despite Puzo's agent telling him to turn down the offer, Puzo was desperate for money and accepted the deal.[14][15] Paramount's Robert Evans relates that, when they met in early 1968, he offered Puzo the $12,500 deal for the 60-page manuscript titled Mafia after the author confided in him that he urgently needed $10,000 to pay off gambling debts.[16] The film received three awards of its 11 Oscar category nominations, including Puzo's Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Coppola and Puzo then collaborated on sequels to the original film, The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Part III (1990). Coppola and Puzo preferred the title The Death of Michael Corleone for the third film, but Paramount Pictures found that unacceptable.[17] In September 2020, for the film's 30th anniversary, it was announced that a new cut of the film titled Mario Puzo's The Godfather, Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone would have a limited theatrical release in December 2020 followed by digital and Blu-ray.[18] Coppola said the film is the version he and Puzo had originally envisioned, and it "vindicates" its status among the trilogy.[19]
In mid-1972, Puzo wrote the first draft of the script for the 1974 disaster film Earthquake, but he was unable to continue work because of his prior commitment to The Godfather Part II. Work continued on the script without his involvement, with writer George Fox (working on his first, and only, motion picture screenplay) and producer / director Mark Robson, who remained uncredited as a writer. Puzo retained screen credit in the completed film as a result of a quickly-settled lawsuit over story credit (most elements from his first draft made it into the final film), and Puzo's name subsequently featured heavily in the advertising. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for Richard Donner's Superman, which then also included the plot for Superman II, as they were originally written as one film. He also collaborated on the stories for the 1982 film A Time to Die and the 1984 Francis Ford Coppola film The Cotton Club.
Puzo never saw the publication of his penultimate book, Omertà, but the manuscript was finished before his death, as was the manuscript for The Family. However, in a review originally published in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jules Siegel, who had worked closely with Puzo at Magazine Management Company, speculated that Omertà may have been completed by "some talentless hack". Siegel also acknowledged the temptation to "rationalize avoiding what is probably the correct analysis, that [Puzo] wrote it and it is terrible".[21]
