The Godfather - Mario Puzo [1]
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First New American Library Printing, March 2002
First New American Library Essential Editions Printing, October 2005
Copyright © Mario Puzo, 1969
Introduction copyright © Robert J. Thompson, 2002
Afterword copyright © Peter Bart, 2002
All rights reserved.
NEW AMERICAN LIBRARY and logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
eISBN: 9781101226704
The Library of Congress has cataloged the original New American Library
trade paperback edition of this title as follows:
Puzo, Mario, 1920-99
The Godfather / by Mario Puzo; with an introduction by Robert J. Thompson; an afterword
by Peter Bart.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-04311-0
1. Corleone family (Fictitious characters)—Fiction. 2. Italian Americans—Fiction.
3. Organized crime—Fiction. 4. New York (NY)—Fiction. 5. Criminals—Fiction.
6. Mafia—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.U9 G6 2002
13’.54—dc21 2001056214
Set in Fairfield Light
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Introduction
by Robert J. Thompson
AT THE END of the 1960s, the Western was still the dominant American epic. The myth of the birth of a nation, settlers plowing from sea to shining sea behind the engine of manifest destiny, had captured our national imagination for a century. From the opening of the frontier after the Civil War, through the brief but golden age of the cowboy, to the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill, the myth of the West was being created as it was being lived. Then, just as the frontier was closing, Hollywood was repackaging the age of Western expansion for consumption by citizens of a new century. The Great Train Robbery, one of the first movie narratives, was a Western. If the Greeks had the Iliad and the Odyssey; if the Romans had the Aeneid; if the Jews had the Hebrew scriptures, the United States had Wyatt Earp and John Wayne.
All of that has changed. The Western has been replaced by the mob story as the central epic of America. By exchanging the geographical frontier for the urban frontier and by embodying themes of the great immigrant narratives, the mobster, it might be argued, has taken the place of the Western hero in the American heart. The Sopranos currently reigns as one of the most critically acclaimed television series in the history of the medium, and a handful of mob movies remain among the most celebrated films in all of American cinema. It took a product of enormous cultural power to effect this change. In this case it was a novel which, in its resonance and influence, rivals other popular novels, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Wind. The provenance of the new American myth can be traced to the publication of The Godfather.
The story you are holding was first published in 1969, which was, as you may know, a very interesting year. U.S. bombing raids in Vietnam reached their