About Mario Puzo
Mario Francis Puzo 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, The Family, was released posthumously in 2001. In 1950, Puzo's first short story, "The Last Christmas," was published in American Vanguard and republished in the 1953 anthology New Voices: American Writing Today #1. In mid-1972, Puzo wrote the first draft of the script for the 1974 disaster film Earthquake, but he was unable to continue work into 1973 because of his prior commitment to The Godfather Part II. After the war, he wrote his first book, the novel The Dark Arena, which was published in 1955.
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