Teacher to write new 'Godfather' novel

NEW YORK-- A new name has entered the house of the Corleones: Mark Winegardner, a fiction writer whose previous subjects include baseball, Cleveland and organized crime, has won a contest to continue the saga of Mario Puzo's fictional crime family.

The decision, made by Random House and the Puzo literary estate, was announced Friday on the "Today" show. "The Godfather Returns" is tentatively scheduled to come out in the fall of 2004.

"There are many stories left to tell," said Winegardner, 41, director of the creative writing program at Florida State University.

In an e-mail sent last fall to literary agents, Random House editor Jonathan Karp wrote that he was looking for "someone who is in roughly the same place in life Mario Puzo was when he wrote 'The Godfather' -- at mid-career, with two acclaimed literary novels to his credit, who writes in a commanding and darkly comic omniscient voice."

Puzo, who died in 1999, was $20,000 in debt and supporting a wife and five children when he sat down to write "The Godfather," which came out in 1969. "It was really time to grow up and sell out," the author later said.

Karp said he received more than 100 proposals, many of them quickly rejected, including one that had Michael Corleone fall in love with a Native American social activist and one that didn't even mention the Corleones. Two were turned down because the authors were British.

Winegardner's books include the baseball novel "Prophet of the Sandlots" and "Crooked River Burning," a class conscious story set in Cleveland. Like Puzo, he has a knack for writing about crime. Unlike Puzo, he's not Italian.

"I am, however, German-Irish like (Corleone consigliere) Tom Hagen, and he did just fine in this world," Winegardner said.

Finalists included James Carlos Blake, author of several violent thrillers set in the West, and Vince Patrick, whose novel "The Pope of Greenwich Village" was adapted into an acclaimed movie starring Eric Roberts and Mickey Rourke.

"We were looking for an original writer who would bring his own vision to Mario Puzo's mythic characters, just as Francis Ford Coppola did in the films," Karp said in a statement Friday.

"The Godfather" has sold more than 20 million copies.