Reporters from The New Yorker haunted New York’s pizzerias during the nineteen-seventies, too. By that time, the pizzeria had become part of the city’s identity. Talk of the Town wrote, with pride, about the remodeling and expansion of The Famous Ray’s Pizza, at Eleventh and Sixth: it seemed a proxy for the vitality of the city itself. (The Famous Ray’s has since been renamed The Famous Roio’s, after it was sued, famously, by a coalition of other Rays.) And, in 1971, Calvin Trillin introduced readers to Larry “Fats” Goldberg, the owner of two Goldberg’s Pizzerias, which served Chicago-style pizza. To curators at the Smithsonian, the neon “Goldberg’s Pizzeria” sign was so emblematic of the history of New York City, and of America as a whole, that they brought it to Washington, D.C., and used it in an exhibit called “A Nation of Nations,” which also featured Thomas Jefferson’s desk and George Washington’s mess kit. Trillin wrote several articles about Goldberg, who happened to be a college friend. He was particularly fascinated by Goldberg’s diet: having dropped, in his twenties, from three hundred and twenty pounds to a hundred and sixty, Goldberg somehow managed to stay slim for the rest of his life, even while owning and operating two (Chicago-style!) pizzerias. Scientists, Trillin reported, were so flabbergasted by this achievement that they “asked Fats if he would mind donating some of his fat cells for analysis.” Goldberg tells Trillin that he eats pizza only once a week. He has a quarter of a sausage pizza on Sunday night—“but then he works at the ovens trying to sweat it off.”

The end of the sixties marked an epochal change in The New Yorker’s pizza coverage, which can be divided into two eras, pre-delivery and post-delivery. In the post-delivery era, all of the big stories involve delivery pizza, which expanded pizza’s reach in all sorts of surprising ways. In the late sixties, for example, the U.S. Army’s 113th Military Intelligence Unit used fake pizza deliveries to spy on reporters and politicians. And in 1991, Pizza Hut delivered free pizza to the group which was holed-up in the Russian White House, resisting the coup against Gorbachev.

The biggest stories, though, involved Domino’s Pizza and its eccentric founder, Thomas Monaghan. The New Yorker first wrote about Monaghan in 1987, when he visited New York to show off his 1931 Bugatti Royale, an eight-million-dollar car, complete with a “rhinoceros-skin seat for the chauffeur,” at a car show at the Javits Center. At the time, Monaghan was one of America’s more flamboyant businessmen: he owned eight aircraft, including a Sikorsky S-76 helicopter. (On one memorable occasion, after the Detroit Tigers, which he owned, won the 1984 World Series, and Detroit erupted in celebratory riots, Monaghan used it to deliver several hundred pizzas to fans and journalists trapped in Tiger Stadium.) Domino’s sold a billion dollars’ worth of pizza each year, and Monaghan spent lavishly—on Domino’s Farms, a huge office complex with an associated petting farm in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a massive Frank Lloyd Wright collection, which included furniture, stained glass, and, the magazine reported, “two and a half Frank Lloyd Wright houses.”

In 2007, Peter J. Boyer’s piece about Monaghan, “The Deliverer,” revealed how the pizza tycoon was far more fascinating than the earlier reporting had suggested. Monaghan, it turned out, had grown up in Michigan, in a series of foster homes and, eventually, an orphanage—the St. Joseph’s Home for Boys, “a high-Victorian mansion … run by Felician nuns.” In the dormitory, on the third floor, the boys slept in “rows of small beds with metal-tube frames, each separated by a wooden chair, upon which the boys laid their clothes at night.” They ate “a seemingly bottomless supply of turnips,” and “discipline was meted out with a strap, administered by a feared nun named Sister Ladislaus.” Monaghan developed a close relationship with a particularly beatific nun, Sister Berarda, who, long afterward, remembered his spiritual temperament: “When he came to chapel,” she recalled, “he really prayed.” She encouraged him to dream big. After St. Joseph’s, Monaghan enlisted in the Marines, then lost his savings in an oil-well scheme. He finally found success in 1960, after he and his brother Jim, a mailman, bought DominiNick’s pizza in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Monaghan had always had an obsessive, visionary sensibility, and he applied his intelligence and imagination to his new pizzeria. He worked hundred-hour weeks, and streamlined the pizza-making process; at one point, he was “timed making a twelve-inch pepperoni pie in eleven seconds.” “By 1985,” Boyer reports, “Domino’s was opening nearly three new stores a day, more than any restaurant chain in history.”

During the construction of the Domino’s empire, Monaghan had adopted a casual attitude toward his Catholicism. Afterward, Boyer writes, he rediscovered it. He began giving money to the church, and started learning, with the help of a number of distinguished Catholic intellectuals, about theology and church history. One day, he read an essay, by C. S. Lewis, about the sin of pride—a sin, Lewis wrote, which was exemplified by the endless striving of the wealthy for ever-greater wealth. “That hit me right between the eyes,” Monaghan told Boyer; after laying awake all night, he swore a “millionaire’s vow of poverty.” Monaghan began selling off many of his possessions, including the helicopter and the Bugatti. He abandoned the construction of his dream house halfway through. He even sold the Detroit Tigers to one of his pizza rivals, Mike Ilitch, the founder of Little Caesar’s.

Since then, he has paid for the construction of a new cathedral in Managua, Nicaragua, and invested much of his fortune in the founding of a staunchly Catholic university—Ave Maria University, in Naples, Florida, and its associated Ave Maria School of Law. Monaghan was dissatisfied with the nation’s Catholic universities: Notre Dame, Boyer points out, “has become the sort of institution that stages ‘The Vagina Monologues,’” and Monaghan’s faith, which was forged at St. Joseph’s, is more conservative. “What I wanted was something that wasn’t there,” Monaghan said. “And if it wasn’t there that means that I have to start it.” The Domino’s pizza fortune, he decided, was “God’s money.” Monaghan explained his choices this way: “I was taught—and I bought it—that if I live a certain way I’m going to go to Heaven, and if I live a certain I was going to go to Hell…. And that’s for eternity. And Hell was worse than anything you can imagine here. Heaven was better than anything you can imagine. So to me, it’s all that simple. I get it, and I want other people to get it, too, for their own benefit. Is that illogical? Is that insanity? I don’t know. I don’t want to go to Hell.”

Here on earth, pizza itself hasn’t changed. It’s still pretty much the same dough, cheese, and tomato sauce. In 1989, the poet Deborah Garrison, who grew up in Ann Arbor, wrote about her own experience at Domino’s, where she worked as a teen-ager. The pleasures of Domino’s, she recalled, were simple ones. Her friend Danny convinced her to apply for a job by telling her “about cruising in the car with Fleetwood Mac blasting on the radio and a stack of fresh pies (they were always called pies) in the hotbox on the seat next to you.” When she was hired, Garrison was too young to drive the delivery car; instead, she was given “a scratchy new Domino’s shirt” and taught how to spin dough. She remembers “smacking it, stretching it, lifting it with fists, and twirling it”: