Word: puzo
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...shake-up was another stroke of luck. It separated Puzo from his civil service security blanket and drove him to the offices of Magazine Management. The company owned such macho publications as Male, Men and Man's World. Puzo wrote battle stories. "I became an ace pulp writer," he recalls. "I wiped out whole armies. I wrote a story about an invasion in which I killed 100,000 men and then later read the statistics. There were only 7,000 killed. But in the process, I became an expert on World War II. I knew more than anybody because...
Unfortunately, Puzo also eats like he reads. He has attempted to leave 50 excess pounds on fat farms in the U.S. and Europe but the burden always finds its way back home. "My wife tries to feed me salads and my kids wrestle me from the refrigerator door," he says. But in the middle of the night, insomniac Puzo frequently drifts down to the kitchen and prepares his favorite snack: spaghetti smothered in butter sauce...
During his Magazine Management days, Puzo never stopped his intake of calories or his output of serious fiction. His second novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim, drew heavily on his childhood experiences. Again he found an audience of enthusiastic reviewers, but few paying readers. The author remained a hermit to New York literary life, though he had some close writing friends. Among those in his regular card-playing group was Joseph Heller. Recalls Puzo: "I used to get mad at him and throw his papers around. How could I know that the stuff was going to be Catch...
...stubbornness was justified. Late in 1965 a Putnam editor stopped in at Magazine Management's offices, overheard Puzo telling Mafia yarns and offered a $5,000 advance for a book about the Italian underworld. The rest is publishing history?and American sociology. Puzo's saga of blood and money, treachery and revenge, class injury and ferocious pride, is one of the most gripping stories in modern popular fiction. Despite its cast of venal monsters and hired killers, The Godfather offered a nostalgic view of the embattled family defending and enriching itself in a ruthless world. Don Corleone even became...
...tone and settings of The Godfather were so authentic that many readers thought Puzo himself had underworld connections. But the novel, which never once mentions the word Mafia, was written entirely from research and anecdotes the author had heard from his Italian immigrant mother and on the streets of New York. Recalls Puzo: "After the book became famous, I was introduced to a few gentlemen related to the material. They were flattering. They refused to believe that I had never been in the rackets. They refused to believe that I had never had the confidence of a don." But Puzo...