The Fortunate Pilgrim

The Fortunate Pilgrim is a 1965 novel by Mario Puzo. It deals with the Angeluzzi-Corbos family, a family of immigrants living an adopted life in New York City. The head of the family is Lucia Santa, a wife, widow and mother of two families. It is her formidable will that steers them through the Great Depression and the early years of World War II. But she cannot prevent the conflict between Italian and American values, or the violence and bloodshed which must surely follow.

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."

Until his dying day, Mario Puzo considered The Fortunate Pilgrim 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's fame rose to the height of his fortunes as a writer. Many Italian American Groups from the Sons of Italy to the National Italian American Foundation have decried the stereotyping of Italians as Mafiosi, since their population actually has no higher percentage of organized crime than other ethnic groups in America.

Some insight in the The Fortunate Pilgrim:
Lucia Santa was an italian immigrant. At seventeen she boarded a ship in her native Italy to sail for America to marry a man she had never known except as a playmate as a small child on a neighboring farm. It was a fortunate turn of events for Lucia to be offered such an arrangement having come from such a poor family, too poor to even afford bridal linen for her wedding bed. It was unlikely she would have ever found a husband in Italy unless she happened across one smitten with love for her, for Lucia Santa bared the greatest shame of all, the shame of poverty. So with a quiet grace Lucia Santa along with two other maidens from her little village boarded a ship to sail for New York and search for a new life leaving her country and her family behind.


Viewed through her eyes and the eyes of her children; Larry, Octavia, Vinnie, Gino, Sal and Lena, The Fortunate Pilgrim is a vibrant and colorful picture of life during this period in Italian-American history. Puzo paints a story like Van Gogh paints a canvas, his words evoke emotions, his pen awakens images that you can truly feel with the turn of each page. You smell the aroma from the tomato sauce bubbling on the black cast iron stove in the small kitchen, you feel the summer sun on your back as you skip along with young Gino as he sails a plank down the gutter on his way home from selling ice stolen from the train yard.


Puzo’s characters are endearing yet with real problems, complex emotions, powerful motivations and individual quirks, they aren’t there merely to serve a purpose, to drive the plot forward. In fact The Fortunate Pilgrim’s strength is not in it’s plot but in it’s fully evolved characters. Just as in life, no person is purely good or purely evil, there are no one dimensional characters, even the minor characters have the flair and gust of life. The story weaves itself around the characters rather than the characters being born out of it.


This is not to say that the strength of the story in Fortunate Pilgrim is lacking in any way, but it is this human-ness of his characters that draws you into it, allowing you to empathize with them. You feel the exhiliration as Larry squares off with a policeman in the train yard in order to defend the practices of his little hoodlum brother, you experience the moment of panic as Gino arrives home from a carefree day (against his mother's wishes) of stickball only to find his building surrounded by a crowd of neighbors and police, the same worry as Lucia Santa wonders where to get the money to feed her family as her older children, the breadwinners, marry and find their own families to support.