Chris Messenger is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of Sport and the Spirit of Play in American Fiction: Hawthorne to Faulkner and Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction; and is the coauthor, with Chet Walker, of Long Time Coming: A Black Athlete's Coming-of-Age in America.

Acknowledgments
Introduction

PART I. Popular Fiction Criticism and American Careers

1. Popular Fiction: Taste, Sentiment, and the Culture of Criticism

2. Mario Puzo: An American Writer's Career

PART II. Reading The Godfather: Critical Strategies and Theoretical Models

3. Bakhtin and Puzo: Authority as the Family Business

4. The Godfather and the Ethnic Ensemble

5. Barthes and Puzo: The Authority of the Signifier

PART III. Positioning The Godfather in American Narrative Study

6. The Godfather and Melodrama: Authorizing the Corleones as American Heroes

7. The Corleones as ¿Our Gang¿: The Godfather Interrogated by Doctorow's Ragtime

8. The American Inadvertent Epic: The Godfather Copied

9. The Godfather Sung by The Sopranos

Conclusion
Notes
Works Cited
Index