David Mamet On 'Chicago': 'These Were The Stories You Grew Up With'

Chicago. David Mamet.

Maybe that's all that needs saying to introduce the first novel in more than 20 years by the celebrated and controversial playwright and screenwriter, who has so often made the city a signature in his works. It's a story of the mob era: hits ordered and adversaries iced; hooch in trucks which winds up in teapots; gunsels, madams, made men and molls.

"You know, I was thinking a lot about historical-- and then of course he and Francis [Ford Coppola] made it into a movie, which is rather different than the book. This were the stories that they grew up with. That was the stuff that being an Italian-American, whose grandparents had been connected with the immigrant generation and thus with the mob, just like Margaret Mitchell grew up with stories of the Old South. And in Chicago in my generation — I was born in 1947 — you grew up with stories of the mob, because my parents were the immigrant generation, and all the parents of my friends were the immigrant generation, and those were the people whom they were associated with, or were their adversaries starting off in America. So when you grew up in Chicago in the '50s, these were the stories you grew up with."