Fortunate Pilgrim

efore The Godfather and The Last Don, there was Puzo's classic story about the loves, crimes and struggles confronted by one family of New York City immigrants living in Hell's Kitchen. Fresh from the farms in Italy, Lucia Santa struggles to hold her family together in a strange land. At turns poignant, comic and violent, and with a new preface by the author, The Fortunate Pilgrim is Italian-American fiction at its very best.

Originally published in 1965, The Fortunate Pilgrim by Mario Puzo, was the novel that preceded his mega bestseller, The Godfather. This saga of Italian-American immigrants concerns Lucia Santa and her six children in New York's Hell's Kitchen beginning in the years before the Depression. Each child makes a choice in the name of assimilation, including her oldest son, who becomes involved with the Mafia.

Before The Godfather and The Last Don, Mario Puzo wrote The Fortunate Pilgrim, a novel many believe to be one of the classics of Italian-American fiction. In this special edition, Mario Puzo's legions of fans will discover a different side of this legendary author, writing for the first time about an Italian family in which a woman holds the power.

Lucia Santa has traveled three thousand miles of dark ocean, from the mountain farms of Italy to the streets of New York, hoping for a better life. Instead, she finds herself in Hell's Kitchen, in a bad marriage, raising six children on her own. As Lucia struggles to hold her family together, her daughter confronts the adult world of work and romance while her eldest son is drawn into the Mafia. Meanwhile, her youngest son aspires to American pursuits she cannot understand.

Library Journal

Puzo has called this 1965 pre-Godfather novel his personal favorite of his oeuvre. It recounts the life of Lucia Santa Angeluzzi-Corbo, a Southern Italian immigrant who settles in New York in the 1920s. This "very colorful and perceptive novel" remains "highly readable" for today's audience (LJ 3/15/65).

Lifelong New Yorker Mario Puzo drew upon figures in his Italian-American family to create the characters in his smash hit The Godfather in 1969; but he claimed never to have met a real-life mobster, and his detailed portrait of the Mafia world came entirely from diligent research.