Mario Francis Puzo (/ˈpuːzoʊ/; Italian: [ˈmaːrjo ˈputtso, -ddzo]; October 15, 1920 – July 2, 1999) was an American author, screenwriter, and journalist. He is known for his 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.
Puzo was born in the Hell's Kitchen section of New York City to Italian immigrants from Pietradefusi, Province of Avellino, Campania. When Puzo was 12, his father, who worked as a trackman for the New York Central Railroad, was committed to the Pilgrim State Hospital insane asylum for schizophrenia, and his wife, Maria, was left to raise their seven children. He served in the US Army Air Forces in Germany in World War II, and later graduated from the City College of New York. Puzo married a German woman, Erika, with whom he had five children. When Erika died of breast cancer at the age of 58 in 1978, her nurse, Carol Gino, became Puzo's companion.
In 1950, his first short story, "The Last Christmas," was published in American Vanguard. After the war, he wrote his first book, The Dark Arena, which was published in 1955.

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