[In the following interview, Puzo comments on The Godfather, his literary success, and The Last Don.]

Mario Puzo makes us an offer we don't want to refuse. After nearly two decades of public silence, he agrees to grant PW his first interview in 18 years (though a later one, described as "exclusive," appeared last week in New York magazine), in order to talk about his masterful new novel, The Last Don, due out from Random House in August, and about the arc of his writing career. So on an early summer day, we travel out to Long Island under a hot milky sky to sit with him in the second-floor sunroom of his home. Also present is his editor, Jonathan Karp.

"Why did you decide to speak with us?" we ask Puzo after he sets us up with a cold soda.

"I've reformed." After 75 years, Puzo's voice is husky but still sweet with the lilt and rhythms of the Manhattan streets where he grew up. "I figured, give it a try, it'll be a nice experience before I die. Also, I got all these grandchildren, and they don't know that I used to be famous."

Used to be famous? Puzo delights in irony, though he rarely laughs. This stocky man relaxed on a sofa across from us, large, open face topped by thinning gray hair, clad in a pink shirt and white trousers, gripping a big cigar that he never lights, is world famous as the author of seven novels and 10 films—above all, of The Godfather, which, 27 years after publication, has sold, according to Puzo, an astounding 21 million copies. Puzo is proud of what these sales mean. He talks about it within our first five minutes together.

"You know how I know how many copies I sold? I got the money. Nobody said I just sold books. I got money. Statistics, they don't mean anything unless you get the money."

The money has bought Puzo a rambling house in a fancy neighborhood, ringed by lawns and tall trees, sided by a tennis court, filled with fine furniture, plush rugs and several huge TV sets. But a fence shields the house from public view, and the computer shining on the desk nearby is used not by him but by his longtime companion, author Carol Gino. Puzo writes by hand, and at an old typewriter. Instead of servants or a secretary, he employs two of his five children, all now grown. Here, it seems, is a man who cares passionately about money but who doesn't flaunt it.

Money—its lure and power—dominates Puzo's work. "To me," he says, "money is the focus of everything you see people do." It's not too surprising to hear this from a man born to illiterate Italian immigrant parents in Hell's Kitchen, whose father abandoned his wife and five kids when Puzo was 12. "I knew I lived in poverty," Puzo says. "That was one of the things that helped me to write. It was my way out."

The ambition to write his way out carried Puzo through high school. World War II erupted when he was 21, taking him to Germany, where he met and married the mother of his children, now deceased. In the late 1940s, Puzo returned to Manhattan for night classes at the New School. "I was studying literature, trying to be a writer," he reminisces. "Since I was a veteran, I got 120 bucks a month for going to school. So I was going for the 120 bucks. But it was a really wonderful education."

During the day, Puzo worked as a federal employee. In his spare time, he wrote The Dark Arena, a literary melodrama set in occupied Germany, published by Random House in 1955. The novel received glowing reviews but sank in sales. So did Puzo's heart. Determined to make it as an artist, he began an autobiographical novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim. Shortly before its 1964 publication by Atheneum, he quit the civil service to edit men's adventure magazines. A new job, a new book, a new publisher; but, again, strong reviews drew only weak sales. Now Puzo despaired. "I didn't make money on it. When that happens, you get such a feeling of self-loathing. That you've done something valuable but nobody values it. So you despise yourself. And you despise the public."

He saw only one solution, he recalls. "I said, 'well, I gotta write a book that people will buy.'" As he speaks these words, Puzo's hands, always in motion, swoop like birds of prey. Otherwise, he sits nearly motionless. His eyes glint dark and lustrous from behind wide-framed glasses.

The book was The Godfather. When Atheneum rejected Puzo's outline, he brought it to Putnam, where, in 1965, editor Bill Targ advanced him $5000. "I'd never heard of so much money in my life," he says. "I mean, it was mind-boggling." More mind-boggling still was the novel's success. At the top of national bestseller lists for much of 1969, its publication year, it became the top-selling novel of the 1970s and, according to Putnam, of all time. It proved a cultural watershed, bringing the Mafia to national attention and spawning generations of mob novels, influencing writers from Elmore Leonard to Eugene Izzi.

The Godfather swept sea changes into Puzo's professional and personal life as well. He acquired an agent, Candida Donadio, who still represents him. He added wealth to fame when Putnam sold paperback rights to Fawcett for $410,000. And he launched his second career, as a screenwriter. "I refused to write the script of The Godfather at first," Puzo remembers. "Then the producer, Al Ruddy, came to New York with his wife. They took me to lunch at the Plaza. I was prepared to say no again. But I was charmed by Ruddy's wife, because she had a poodle in her handbag. She opens the handbag and out pops this dog. And that was so charming I said yes."

The two Oscars Puzo has won, for his screenplays of The Godfather and The Godfather: Part II gleam on the mantelpiece in his living room. He has scripted eight other films, most notably The Godfather: Part III, the first two Superman films, Earthquake and The Cotton Club. Puzo reveals that he's also written a screenplay that was never filmed, based on a Zane Grey novel "like a western Godfather." Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount, rejected it because, Puzo says, he hated the desert. "I don't like sand in a movie," Eisner reportedly told Puzo.

Talking about screenwriting, again Puzo refers to the money. "The writers today," he says, "we're all sort of dopes. Everybody should rush out to Hollywood and get the easy money." To transform a novel into a screenplay, he adds, "you figure out what the primary story is. All the other stories, you lop 'em off like they lop off the fat on a piece of pork."

His newfound success granted Puzo freedom to publish what he wanted—in 1972, the essays and stories of The Godfather Papers; in 1978, still with Bill Targ at Putnam, Fools Die, a novel about Las Vegas, Hollywood and the New York publishing industry. Paperback rights sold to Fawcett for a then-record $2.2 million, but the book failed to match The Godfather's sales or influence. Six years later, Puzo returned with The Sicilian. Edited by Joni Evans at Linden Press, the novel briefly brought back Michael Corleone of Godfather fame in its tale of a Sicilian brigand. It was the top-selling hardcover fiction of 1985, but Puzo's next book, from Random House, The Fourth K, a thriller that placed a future Kennedy in the White House, fared relatively poorly.

"I was a young assistant editor at the time," interjects Karp. "That's how I met Mario. I don't think that people got the political irony of it at all." For that, Puzo takes the blame. "I realized from the failure of the book that there are certain rules that you can't break. I broke them with Kennedy as the hero when I turned him into a guy who would have been a dictator." Puzo himself can charm, and his fierce honesty is part of his charm.

The Fourth K was almost Puzo's last book. In January 1991, its publication month, he nearly died. Already diabetic, he was stricken with heart trouble and underwent an emergency quadruple bypass. Puzo didn't write during the next two years. Instead, he researched a novel on the Borgias but decided not to write it. "The trouble," he explains, "is in showing the Borgia Pope as he was. That would make such an uproar, who knows if you want to get into that? So I went from the Borgia book to writing a Hollywood and Vegas book. And the Clericuzio popped up."

The Clericuzio are the hypnotic dark heart of The Last Don, the most powerful Mafia family in the country. Their chief is Don Domenico Clericuzio, whose great age and power is mirrored in two other male characters, a casino owner and a Hollywood studio chief. Each stands nearly above the novel's wild swirl of deals, betrayals, violence; yet each will order the snuffing of a career or a life as necessary. We ask Puzo if his own years and brush with death influenced the book. "I think so," he says. "The character of Don Clericuzio, for instance. The way he can isolate himself from emotion, where he arranges the killing of his own…. It's something I can do now. You reach a certain age where you're quite capable of great sin."

Puzo's own age becomes more apparent as we continue to speak. He is game to talk as long as we wish, and he's ever ready with ideas and opinions, but his voice loses zest as the afternoon passes. The air in the room, warm when we came in, grows close.

Puzo's maturity elevates The Last Don, a novel as grand and complex as any he has written. It embodies a lifetime of experience or interest in Hollywood, Vegas, the mob—and, above all, in money. "I think The Last Don is an ambitious book," he says. "All through it I'm trying to show a strict correlation between the criminal persona and an industrial criminal persona. And that the crucial element is money."

It becomes clear as we speak that Puzo's obsession with money isn't about greed. Early in his life, it was about escape from poverty; in middle age, about public validation of his talent. Now, money is a force to be captured in his art—and one that to him raises a moral question. "What is the central thing to most people?" Puzo asks us. "Earning a living, earning your daily bread. If these guys didn't commit these crimes, they'd be at the mercy of employers, they'd be at the mercy of economics. They're asserting their own power over their fate." Yet Puzo bans morals from his fiction. Though he has taken flak for not condemning characters—Don Corleone especially—who act like monsters, he frowns on those who judge their own creations. "If you're a true novelist, your first duty is to tell a story; if you want to moralize, write nonfiction, philosophy, whatever."

What will follow The Last Don? Karp mentions that Puzo recently got a call from [actor Marlon] Brando, who, Puzo, explains, "wants to be in The Last Don if it's a feature film, but he won't do TV." And film rights have been sold to TV, Puzo announces: "The movie business didn't bid high enough." Puzo has time to write, since he lives alone. But there is the allure of reading, "the only pleasure in life that hasn't disappointed me," and he works in fits and starts. "I'm an essentially lazy writer," he confesses. "A lot of my writing schedule is laying on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling." Still, he has plans. A film of The Godfather: Part IV is "a possibility." He's working on a screenplay of Gino's first book, The Nurse's Story. He may yet write the Borgia book, and he's contemplating an epic historical about the Mafia. "I write a book about the 700 years of the Mafia, then I drop dead," he jokes. "Everybody's had enough of the Mafia, everybody's had enough of me."

Whether time will rate Puzo as a great writer or less remains to be seen. He has his Oscars but no major literary prizes, no Pulitzer. "I would have loved to have won a Pulitzer." he says. "But if you go back over the books that won, are they read today? I think the test is, do people keep reading them? Now it's, what, 27 years since The Godfather? I still get a royalty check from England, for a substantial amount. Jesus Christ, 27 years, selling a book, that's something."

Yes it is, we agree as we rise to leave. Puzo's hand is dry as we shake it goodbye. He has trouble with stairs, he says, so he can't see us out. Downstairs, we admire those Oscars, testament to Puzo's storytelling prowess, to the remarkable life he has led. We flash to The Last Don, and we think of how marvelous it is that this writer, age be damned, has once more put that talent and life's wisdom on the page, and this time in fullest flower.