Mario Puzo's 1969 novel is the book that fixed the American mafia in the popular imagination and gave rise to one of the most celebrated films ever made. It tells the story of the Corleones, a Sicilian American crime family led by Don Vito Corleone, the aging patriarch whose courtly manners, code of loyalty, and readiness for violence make him a figure of immense power in postwar New York. When Vito is nearly assassinated after refusing to involve his family in the narcotics trade, the fragile peace among the city's crime families collapses, and the war that follows draws in his sons: the hot-tempered Sonny, the weak Fredo, and above all Michael, the youngest, a decorated war veteran who had meant to stay clear of the family business but is pulled inexorably into it and ultimately transformed into a colder, more ruthless don than his father. Around this central drama Puzo weaves a portrait of an entire subculture—its rituals of respect and vengeance, its marriages and betrayals, its entanglements with Hollywood, Las Vegas, and the machinery of legitimate business and politics. Puzo popularized the language and mythology of organized crime, from the "offer he can't refuse" to the codes of omertà and family honor, and gave the genre its enduring themes: the corrupting logic of power, the tension between family loyalty and moral ruin, and the immigrant's dark pursuit of the American dream. A sweeping, propulsive saga of loyalty, ambition, and violence, The Godfather remains the defining novel of the American crime family.