"Vito Corleone is the head of the Corleone crime family – the most powerful Mafia family in New York City. He is depicted as an ambitious Sicilian immigrant who moves to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and builds a Mafia empire. Upon his death at the end of the novel, his youngest son, Michael, succeeds him as the head of the Corleone family. Vito has two other sons, Santino ("Sonny") and Frederico ("Fredo" or "Freddie"), as well as a daughter, Connie, all of whom play major roles in the story. He also informally adopts Sonny's friend, Tom Hagen, who later becomes a lawyer and the Family's consigliere.

While he oversees a business founded on gambling, bootlegging, and union corruption, he is known as a generous man who lives by a strict moral code of loyalty to friends and, above all, family. At the same time, he is known as a traditionalist who demands respect commensurate with his status; even his closest friends refer to him as "Godfather" or "Don Corleone" rather than "Vito".

Vito prides himself on being careful and reasonable, but he is nevertheless willing to use violence when he thinks it is necessary. When his godson, singer Johnny Fontane, wants to get out of a contract with a bandleader, Vito offers to buy out the contract. When rebuffed, Vito threatens to kill the bandleader unless he releases Johnny for a token amount. Later, when movie mogul Jack Woltz refuses to give Johnny a role in a film, Vito has one of Woltz's prize horses killed and the horse's severed head placed in Woltz's bed.

It is also noted in the book that Vito almost never loses his temper. This characteristic is mostly a conscious show of restraint to avoid the fate of his father, whose rashness and excitability contributed to his death at the hands of the Mafia in Sicily. When Vito learns that Sonny has been involved in a minor crime, however, he curses at him at length in Sicilian dialect."