Years ago, in a piece about the legacy of Mario Puzo, I wrote, “If there is a God and he is indeed Catholic, then Puzo is burning in hell.”

Before “The Godfather” was published in 1969, historians of organized crime in the 20th century told us that the major stars of the modern mob – in addition to Johnny Torrio, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Frank Costello, and, of course, Al Capone – had names like Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Lansky, Dion O’Bannon, Hymie Weiss, Mo Dalitz, Owney Madden, and Abner “Longy” Zwillman, to mention but a few. After “The Godfather,” the only major crime figures getting any attention were the ones whose names ended in vowels.

George De Stefano’s provocative and lively “An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 438 pages, $26) has convinced me that I’ve been too tough on Puzo – perhaps he only deserves to spend a few centuries in Dante’s purgatorio. “The Godfather,” the book and the movie, did, after all, succeed in reviving interest in Italian-American culture at a time when it appeared to be fading into the suburban landscape. It’s possible that many Italian-Americans were offended by the image of their people created by the film; I can only speak for members of my father’s family, who rather enjoyed the attention and even reveled in the idea that they might actually be a bit feared because of their name.

For Mr. De Stefano, as for many of our generation, Francis Ford Coppola’s film was an epiphany. The gay baby-boomer son of a Neapolitan auto mechanic and a Sicilian housewife, Mr. De Stefano had drifted far from his parents’ world by the time he was in college: “The Stones’ ‘Sticky Fingers’ was on my stereo and a Black Panther poster adorned my dorm room wall. My identity was radical hippie freak, resisting and refusing the establishment in my politics and my partying. My ethnic background was just that, background.”

“An Offer We Can’t Refuse” invites Italian-Americans of all backgrounds to the family table to discuss how mob related movies and television shows have affected the very notion of what their heritage still means in the 21st century. It’s a big table and, as you can imagine, a noisy one.

At the head is Richard Gambino, whose 1974 book, “Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of Italian-Americans,” was the first serious work of nonfiction written on the subject; sitting in the middle are Gay Talese and nearly every other prominent second-generation Italian-American journalist; fighting for attention down at the end of the table are third-generation would-be personas importante such as Maria Laureno, Maria Russo, Bill Tonelli, and, in the interests of full disclosure, me (I am quoted twice by Mr. De Stefano).

The principal topic of discussion is not so much the Mafia itself, whose power most experts seem to feel is dwindling. As the journalist Anthony Mancini puts it in Mr. De Stefano’s book, “The mystique of the Mafia exists even when the Mafia doesn’t.” But “it’s just too good a myth to abandon.” Or at least not to argue about.

No movie or television show has split Italian-Americans like “The Sopranos.” The Columbus Citizens Foundation in Manhattan didn’t want actors Dominic Chianese (Uncle Junior) and Lorraine Bracco (Dr. Melfi) to be in the Columbus Day parade; Annabella Sciorra, who has also appeared on the show, says in the book, “The show has opened up a whole new level of what being Italian-American is … They deal with issues that all middle-class Italian-Americans, all middle-class families deal with.”

For my own part, I agree with Mr. De Stefano that “The Sopranos” is “the richest, most complex and artistically satisfying mob drama in the history of the genre.” The best movies and shows about mobsters and their families – Mr. Coppola’s “Godfather” movies, Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets,” “The Sopranos,” and the late lamented cult TV series “Wiseguy” – were never really about the mob anyway. They were always about the vicissitudes of Italian-American family life and the perils of maintaining tradition in the face of assimilation. In other words, they are a metaphor for the American immigrant experience. Or as a Russian neighbor of mine put it, “I never really thought ‘The Godfather’ was about crime. I though it was about the part where Don Corleone tells Michael he wanted something better for him than he had.”

Taken together, these shows provide an answer to the question of why the people who gave the world Dante, da Vinci, Boccaccio, Verdi, and Rossini have produced so few literary artists in this country. Their grandparents came here without the ability to write in their own language, much less English, but Mr. Coppola, Mr. Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Quentin Tarantino, and several others have used their experiences to give the world the poetry their ancestors couldn’t. As Mr. De Stefano writes, “Italian America still has many more stories to tell.” Don Corleone gave Michael something better after all.

Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach: A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant.”