by PBS
An epigraph attributed to 19th-century novelist Honoré de Balzac opens the sprawling novel about an Italian American family: “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.” In the case of the Corleones, that would be crimes, plural. After Don Vito Corleone is shot in 1945, his sons struggle to take over the family business, sparring with one another and warring with New York’s other mafia families. Despite being groomed for a life of respectability, the youngest, Michael, proves himself to be far more calculating and nefarious than his father. Settled firmly as the head of the family, he transforms into the ultimate antihero.
Puzo based his fictional characters on real people, especially the Five Families said to rule organized crime in New York. The singer Johnny Fontane, who asks the Godfather to help him get out of his studio contract (thereby inspiring the Godfather’s famous declaration “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse”), was said to be a thinly veiled Frank Sinatra. Puzo also looked to the historical past, basing his mafia’s maneuverings on the violent power plays between dominant families during the Italian Renaissance. Even mobsters reportedly loved the book and thought Puzo must have firsthand knowledge of their world, but in fact he had none, writing instead from research and his own experience as the child of poor immigrants from Naples to give readers a vivid sense of the Italian American experience.
Expectations weren’t enormously high when the eponymous movie appeared in 1972. While Puzo’s emotional, bloody novel was a bestseller, Frances Ford Coppola was hardly a household name, and films about organized crime hadn’t met with much success since the 1930s. The collaboration between Coppola and Puzo, however, produced two of the greatest films of American cinema. Lines wrapped around the block during The Godfather’s opening weekend. Book sales shot up. Together, The Godfather and The Godfather II won Best Picture at their respective Academy Awards, and Coppola and Puzo earned a pair of Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay too.
Puzo passed away in 1999, but his characters soldier on, via new authors: The Godfather Returns (2004) and The Godfather’s Revenge (2006) pick up where The Godfather and Puzo’s sequel, The Sicilian (1984), end, covering the fate of the family in the 1950s and 1960s. A prequel, The Family Corleone (2012), describes the rise of Vito, with a focus on the impact of his son Sonny and the adopted-orphan-turned-consigliere Tom Hagen. Puzo’s influence can still be felt across the dramatic arcs and popularity of shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Better Call Saul.
In The Godfather, America is a land of limitless opportunity, a cutthroat meritocracy that rewards fast thinking, hard work, and the willingness to crush anyone who stands in the way. That some of this thinking or work might involve murder, exploitation, gambling, drug- and gun-running, and prostitution isn’t an issue. The values at play in the novel—among them ambition, loyalty, and an unquenchable thirst for power—are distinctly American, as much a part of our culture as apple pie and baseball.
The hardcover edition of Gone Girl, published in 2012.
Author Gillian Flynn was a reporter and critic, and she wrote her novels in her spare time. Flynn appeared in a cameo in the 2014 film adaptation of her novel, directed by David Fincher.
A movie tie-in cover. The film starred Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike.
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GONE GIRL
Gillian Flynn · 2012
The “it” novel of 2012 concerns the disappearance of “it” girl Amy Dunne on her fifth wedding anniversary. Gorgeous and charming, married to Nick, Amy appears to lead an enviable life. She lives in a nice suburban house, she’s friendly with the neighbors, she’s pregnant—and now she’s gone.
Nick convinced Amy to leave their life in New York City and return to the struggling Missouri town where he grew up and his family still lives. When Amy disappears, suspicion falls squarely on him. Did he murder his wife? Or is something far more complicated going on? The expertly plotted novel moves back and forth in time, from Amy’s diary narrating the past to Nick’s search for his wife in the present. Both sections are told in the first person, a variation on the tried-and-true “he said, she said” formula that leaves readers wondering whom to believe. The novel combines elements of suspense, crime, and mystery, and is utterly unputdownable.
Intelligent, off-kilter female protagonists in troubling circumstances have become something of a specialty for Gillian Flynn. Prior to the megahit Gone Girl (2012), Flynn published Sharp Objects (2006), about a reporter who uncovers secrets in her tiny midwestern town, and Dark Places (2009), about a woman who tries to figure out whether her incarcerated brother actually murdered their family when she was a child. Whereas examples of dark, disturbed leading men exist throughout literature and the movies, we don’t have as many female antiheroes. That’s an oversight Flynn seeks to correct—since women, after all, are equally capable of sociopathy and violence.
Flynn learned about literature and movies from her professor parents, who taught reading and film, respectively, at a local community college in Kansas City, where she was born in 1971. She combined these passions into her career as a reporter and critic for Entertainment Weekly, working on her novels in her spare time. She also has a master’s in journalism from Northwestern.
Gone Girl spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Flynn wrote the screenplay for the 2014 movie, produced by Reese Witherspoon and directed by David Fincher. That too was a success, captivating audiences and critics alike.
In one of the book’s most-quoted passages, Amy explains what it means to be “the Cool Girl”:
“Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves… sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth… while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.”
Much saltier in the novel, the full definition resonates with readers reacting to unreasonable demands placed on them by pop culture and social media. Amy’s monologue—and the novel as a whole—helps give women permission to shrug off the stereotype that the fairer sex is naturally good. Gone Girl also captures the disillusionment experienced by the middle class at the start of the 21st century. Like Nick, Flynn herself was laid off from her magazine job, and plenty of 20- and 30-somethings heard the sound of the American dream bursting as the economy collapsed in 2008. As much as Gone Girl is a psychological thriller about a marriage, it’s also a commentary about the failed economy, an exploration about the limits and possibilities of feminism, and a warning about the dangers of believing everything you see on TV.
The first edition cover of Gone with the Wind, published in 1936.
Margaret Mitchell, pictured in 1941, was a reporter and columnist for the Atlanta Journal before her husband urged her to begin writing novels.
Gone with the Wind is also a famous film, starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It was released by MGM in 1929.
39
GONE WITH THE WIND
Margaret Mitchell · 1936
A lifelong resident of Atlanta, where she was born in 1900, Margaret Mitchell was descended from soldiers in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. She grew up hearing stories about the latter and the subsequent era of Reconstruction. As a little girl, she would ride her pony into the Georgia countryside, where veterans would point out ruined plantations as well as the destruction wrought by General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1864 March to the Sea. The Union soldiers’ decimation of the South’s military and civilian infrastructure would become a key plot point in Mitchell’s famous novel. Mitchell was 10 before she learned—to her great surprise—that the Confederate side lost.
Working as a reporter and society columnist for the Atlanta Journal taught Mitchell to research and craft a story, but it was her husband who pushed her to write a novel. Exhausted from lugging books home from the library for Mitchell to read
while she recuperated from an injury, her husband is alleged to have quipped, “For God’s sake, Peggy, can’t you write a book instead of reading thousands of them?”
Gone with the Wind (1936) opens with vain, vapid Scarlett O’Hara flitting about and flirting at a barbecue at Tara, the Georgia plantation where she lives with her family. It’s 1861, just two days after the Battle of Fort Sumter launched the Civil War. She encounters the brooding Rhett Butler, who admires her fiery spirit, but her heart belongs to dandy Ashley Wilkes, who in turn is matched with his distant cousin Melanie. The sweeping historical epic traces the intertwined fates of Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, and Melanie as the war rages, wrecking everything they hold dear.
Mitchell sought to tell a specific story about her hometown—and she succeeded beyond all expectations. Perhaps its first readers saw parallels between the time period of the novel and the Great Depression, another instance of people experiencing extreme hardships, or perhaps they longed to escape exactly those hardships into a vanished world; whatever the reason, the novel sold like crazy. So successful was the book and Academy Award–winning 1939 film, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, that Mitchell once vowed never to write another word. She never published anything again in her lifetime. In 1949, on her way to the movies with her husband, Mitchell was hit by a car. She died five days later, at age 48.
Though the book received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, contemporary readers might be less enthusiastic. Awash in nostalgia for the antebellum South and indifferent to the real experiences and feelings of slaves, the novel is far more revealing of the stories that too many people of Mitchell’s era told themselves about the country’s past than it is of that past itself. People coming to the book in the 21st century are also apt to find that the celebrated passion between Scarlett and Rhett reads much more darkly than it did to its initial audiences.
Despite all that, Scarlett persists as a precursor to strong female protagonists of our own era, like Katniss Everdeen and Daenerys Targaryen. She struggles, but she survives. Mitchell saw Scarlett’s perseverance in the face of adversity as the novel’s true heart. Scarlett not only adapts to her circumstances, but even thrives in many ways. She becomes more resilient for all she is forced to endure, from witnessing the ruination of her beloved Tara to grieving at the death of her family to killing a Yankee soldier who threatens to assault her. How differently we might view her had she kept the name Mitchell used in the novel’s initial drafts: Pansy.
The Penguin Classics edition cover of The Grapes of Wrath.
John Steinbeck, photographed circa 1930, wrote of the Joad family, who embodied the truth of the Great Depression.
Migrant Mother, a 1936 photograph by Dorothea Lange, is one of the most iconic and enduring images from the Great Depression.
40
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
John Steinbeck · 1939
In one of the most iconic images of the Great Depression, a woman furrows her brow and stares into the distance. Lines carve the map of her face into counties and cities. One hand claws her cheek, one hand cradles a filthy infant. Two other children turn their faces away from the camera and burrow against her. She was 32, an itinerant farmhand surviving on birds she managed to kill, doing whatever she had to do to care for her seven children. Dorothea Lange shot the picture, which she named Migrant Mother, in 1936, three years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. He might as well have been describing the black-and-white photo.
Like Lange, Steinbeck wanted to portray the truth of the Great Depression. His fictional family, along with thousands of others, set off for California. The Joads desert their Oklahoma farm, which is collapsing under the dual weight of depression and drought, and succumb to the spell of an ad promising fruit-picking jobs. Grampa and Granma Joad die during the arduous journey west. Two of the Joad sons disappear, one leaving behind a pregnant wife. Even as the remaining Joads meet people who warn that the situation is as awful in California as everywhere else, including a man whose children starved to death as he watched helplessly, the family pushes forward. Once in California, they move from one migrant camp to another, encountering suffering and violence. Ma Joad holds everyone together as best she can. She is the Migrant Mother, removed from Lange’s frame and confronting challenges with courage.
In 1962, Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature, praised by the selection committee for his social realism. He based The Grapes of Wrath on a series of articles he wrote for the San Francisco News in 1936 about the joys and sadness in the lives of migrant workers in California. The book won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. John Ford earned an Academy Award for the 1940 movie, which very quickly became as beloved as the novel. Both Eleanor Roosevelt and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt talked publicly about their great respect for the book, particularly as they stumped for policies meant to pull Americans out of the Depression’s lingering effects.
Born in Salinas, California, in 1902, Steinbeck frequently explored his home state in writing: Tortilla Flat (1935) concerns a group of homeless men in Monterey at the end of World War I. Of Mice and Men (1937) describes the friendship between two itinerant ranch hands, and is based on Steinbeck’s experiences working on farms. When he criticized the California agriculture industry, he did so having witnessed firsthand the crushing effects of its stratified system, exploited by those who wished to keep wealth and power. He died in 1968 and was buried, in accordance with his wishes, in the family plot in Salinas.
Steinbeck goes to great lengths to demonstrate that the true source of the Joads’ trouble is not the economy or the environment. Rather, it’s other people. The primary theme of the book may very well be the idea that we are one another’s worst enemies. He describes the history of California, in which settlers essentially stole land, and he repeatedly shows how self-interest erodes familial and societal bonds. At the same time, however, he demonstrates how acts of kindness, both big and small, have an uplifting effect, which in turn furthers more acts of kindness. Man may pass inhumanity on to man, but he is equally capable of passing on benevolence and selflessness. There is a choice; terrible circumstances may throw it into relief, but there is always a choice.
First edition of Great Expectations, published in 1861.
A portrait of Charles Dickens from 1967. Dickens drew from his childhood experiences and feelings of abandonment in his writing.
Dickens published many of his novels in serial installments in magazines. All the Year Round published the first installments of Great Expectations beginning in 1860. Stories later appeared in Harper’s Weekly.
41
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
Charles Dickens · 1861
Across 15 novels, Charles Dickens created thousands of characters. Few, however, are as memorable as Great Expectations’ Miss Havisham. She stops time at the exact moment her fiancé abandoned her at the altar. She ceases to wind the clocks. As the years go by, the wedding dress she wears becomes increasingly ragged, she loses a shoe, and the cake, party favors, and even her house decay and disintegrate around her. Readers could write the recluse off as crazy if she weren’t so heartbreaking, or if she didn’t provide a clue into how to read Great Expectations: her name—Hav[e] is sham—conveys the novel’s main message that the pursuit of wealth will end in folly.
The most significant chronicler of Victorian England, Dickens became an outspoken advocate for socioeconomic reform, and movingly portrayed children forced to grow up too fast, from the thieving street urchins in Oliver Twist (1838) to the deformed doll maker in Our Mutual Friend (1865).
Pip, whose social and moral development propels Great Expectations, fits into that category as well. Orphaned and residing with his detestable older sister, the seven-year-old boy meets an escaped convict who begs for his help; though Pip tries to assist him, the man is recaptured and sent to a penal colony in Australia. This brief, strange encounter proves to be the fulcrum of Pip’s life, yet he won’t discov
er how—or grasp the full dimensions of the tragedy into which he has been thrust—until years later. In the interval he falls in love with Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, a captivating girl groomed to avenge Miss Havisham’s own broken heart, and he tries to climb the slippery class ladder. His struggles to escape his bleak origins without losing himself form the backbone of this psychologically complex novel.
Although Great Expectations has few literal parallels with Dickens’s life, a strong line of emotional autobiography runs through it. Born in 1812 in southeast England, Charles Dickens left school at age 12 after his father was imprisoned for failure to pay debts. While the rest of the family joined him in jail, Dickens was sent to paste labels on bottles in a factory, difficult physical labor he not only detested but which profoundly influenced his writing and personal beliefs. Like Pip, Dickens felt abandoned in childhood and found that sudden financial success as a young man left him torn between his social expectations and his familial obligations. Dickens wrote Great Expectations in a dark, difficult period. He had recently separated from his wife of 22 years while he pursued the actress Ellen Ternan; one of his 10 children had racked up gambling debts, and another had recently married a man Dickens detested. His anxieties about money, relationships, and personal character take vivid form in the novel’s characters and plot.