It is no coincidence that The Godfather turned out to be a bestseller: Mario Puzo, its author, planned from first to last that the book would be popular and make him money. Puzo was born October 15, 1920, to a family of Italian immigrants, and he spent his childhood in the Italian ghetto of New York called Hell's Kitchen. He was a young boy when he decided to be a writer, but he was discouraged in this by the family's impoverished circumstances. His mother aspired for him to work for the railroad, like his father and brother.

The tension between the life of a writer that Puzo wanted to lead and the traditional working class life that his family was steering him toward was broken by America's entry into World War II in 1941. During the war, stationed in Europe, he lived the life of freedom for a while...