I was at work the other day, looking up Mario Puzo on this website we use to order books in, and his pseudonym Mario Cleri came up. It surprised me because working in a bookstore these last 2 years I've been able to find no work published at all under this name, and it just popped up on this new website we use now. Just curious to know if anybody has read it? I'd have to get it off eBay or something since it's out of print, but just curious to see if anybody else knows about it.

That's very interesting, Liz.

I was not aware that Puzo wrote under any other name, so I don't recall ever seeing that mentioned here, either.

I Googled the name; he apparently wrote another book as well under the name Mario Cleri - "The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw".

The Godfather was dedicated to "Anthony Cleri", who I just discovered was his brother.

Why the different surname, I don't know. Perhaps "Puzo" was the pen name and "Cleri" the real family name.

One of the sites also indicated that "Cleri" was short for "Clericuzio", which was the name he gave the Mafia family in one of his later novels (Omerta or The lst Don - I forget which).

The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw is under Mario Puzo on our database at work. I suppose selling a kid's book under his name could have worked merchandizing wise. Worked for Chopper Reed.

Oh, I didn't realize Davie Shaw was a children's book.

Clericuzio (as in Don Domenico from The Last Don) was either Puzo's mother's maiden name or her first husband's name -- I'll have to look it up. His household was similar, to a degree, as the family in The Fortunate Pilgrim.

In The Godfather Papers and Other Confessions, he explains that some of his older siblings kept the surname of Clericuzio, however they had all shortened it to Cleri. (dedicated to Anthony Cleri)

Similar to John Merlyn in the semi-autobiographical Fools Die, Mario wrote a lot of pieces for pulp magazines which, in his words, he considered "schlock" and not "true art". His pen name for his magazine work was Mario Cleri.

Six Graves to Munich was written in chapters in one of those magazines, similar to the way a lot of Charles Dickens' works were originally published. It has recently been re-released in Europe (and I think here in the States too) as a Mario Puzo work "written as Mario Cleri".