The Fortunate Pilgrim is a 1965 novel by Mario Puzo.
Until his dying day, Mario Puzo considered the novel his finest, most poetic, and literary work. In one of his last interviews he stated that he was saddened by the fact that The Godfather, a fiction he never lived, outshone the novel of his mother's honest immigrant struggle for respectability in America and her courage and filial love, as portrayed in The Fortunate Pilgrim, 1965.
The Fortunate Pilgrim, though it won much literary praise from established American novelists, never earned Puzo a living. It was only when he opted for what Hollywood sold well to America, the stereotype of Italian immigrants as mobsters, that Puzo acquired fame and fortune commensurate with his stature as a writer.
The Fortunate Pilgrim is the real birthplace of The Godfather. As Puzo says, the book's hero, Lucia Santa, is based on his own mother: "Whenever the Godfather opened his mouth, in my own mind I heard the voice of my mother. I heard her wisdom, her ruthlessness, and her unconquerable love for her family and for life itself. … The Don's courage and loyalty came from her; his humanity came from her… and so, I know now, without Lucia Santa, I could not have written The Godfather."
Read more about The Fortunate Pilgrim: Synopsis, Film Adaptation
Famous quotes containing the words fortunate and/or pilgrim:
“It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”
—Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900)
“While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)