SOURCE: "The Godfather as the World's Most Typical Novel," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 329-53.

In the following excerpt, Torgovnick examines the place of The Godfather in Italian-American literature, identifying its conventional bildungsroman and epic themes as a source of its popularity.

The Godfather appeared in March of 1969 and made publishing history: it rose quickly on the best-seller lists and stayed on those lists for an unprecedented sixty-nine weeks. Newsweek and Time were among the first magazines to publish reviews; the most prestigious and coveted of reviews, in the New York Times Book Review, appeared on 27 April, after Puzo's novel had been on the paper's best-seller list for four weeks and had risen to the number two spot. But the early reviews offered shamefully little insight into the novel, commenting rather simplistically on its portrayal of the Mafia. Time, for example, found the moral of...