"Mario Puzo is not the best novelist in the world, nor the most sensitive, nor certainly the most realistic. But he is without doubt one of the most ambitious. In "The Godfather," Puzo sets himself two excruciatingly difficult tasks: to humanize the Mafia and to make a fortune. He succeeded on both counts. Somehow, Puzo has managed to make his fictional Mafia overlord into a kindly, somewhat puritanical old gentleman with moral scruples about the drug business — and to make himself (Puzo) a cool three-quarters of a million dollars in the process... It was all done with mirrors — and some of the most readable writing since the well-plotted novel went out of style."
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Novelists from New York (state)Screenwriters from New York CityBest Adapted Screenplay Academy Award winners
Original Language: English
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Sources
Jacquin Sanders, 'Mario Puzo: Author of ‘The Godfather’', The News-Herald (March 18, 1970), p. 25
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mario_Puzo
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Mario Puzo
Mario Francis Puzo (October 15, 1920 – July 2, 1999) was an American author and screenwriter. He wrote crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably The Godfather (1969), which he later co-adapted into a film trilogy directed by Francis Ford Coppola. He received the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for the first film in 1972 and for Part II in 1974. Puzo also wrote the original screenplay for the 1978 Superman film and its 1980 sequel. His final novel, T
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