Inside Las Vegas.

Inside Las Vegas (1977) is one of only two nonfiction works by Mario Puzo (1920-1999), the Bronx-born novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter best known for The Godfather (1969) and its celebrated film adaptations directed by Francis Ford Coppola, and represents a candid and unusually intimate portrait of the gambling capital at the height of its mid-century mythology. Published in 1977, the book provides an in-depth behind-the-scenes look at the world of gambling in Las Vegas, written from the perspective of a self-described degenerate gambler who brought to his subject both the trained novelist's eye for human character and the personal authority of a man who had lost and won at the tables himself. The photographs were made by John Launois, Michael Abramson, and Susan Fowler-Gallagher of Howard Chapnick's Black Star agency with unusually free access to the back rooms and back stages as well as the gaming rooms and shows, with over 150 black-and-white and color photographic reproductions lending the volume an exceptional visual documentary character alongside Puzo's text. Kirkus Reviews noted that while Puzo was not striving for art, something like it emerged, praising his admiringly clear-eyed love for the meretricious and observing that even readers put off by Puzo's subject matter would find themselves turning one more page.