The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts

The young Mario Puzo read Dostoevsky in the local library and dreamed of “becoming an artist and escaping the ghetto world in which he had been born”. His own early novels tended to portray Italian immigrant families as “honest” and “hardworking”; The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964) is “a classic of Italian American literature”. By the late 1960s Puzo found himself middle‐aged and $20,000 in the red. On his own admission, he was “tired of being an artist”. In 1969 he published The Godfather.

I draw here on a 28‐page essay on Italian American novelists by Fred Gardaphe, Professor of English...