Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as consumerism, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, television, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture". In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
Contents
Early life and influences
DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in New York City and grew up in a Catholic family, with ties to Molise, Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of Belmont, Bronx not far from Arthur Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in the Bronx, DeLillo said he was "always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English."
As a teenager, DeLillo was not interested in writing until he took a summer job as a parking attendant, where the hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a lifelong reading habit. Reflecting on this period, in a 2010 interview, he stated, "I had a personal golden age of reading in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time". Among the writers DeLillo read and was inspired by in this period were James Joyce, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Ernest Hemingway, who was a major influence on DeLillo's earliest attempts at writing in his late teens.
As well as the influence of modernist fiction, DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music—"guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis"—and postwar cinema: "Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut, and then in the '70s came the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: Kubrick, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese and so on. I don't know how they may have affected the way I write, but I do have a visual sense." Of the influence of film, particularly European cinema, on his work, DeLillo has said, "European and Asian cinemas of the 1960s shaped the way I think and feel about things. At that time I was living in New York, I didn't have much money, didn't have much work, I was living in one room...I was a man in a small room. And I went to the movies a lot, watching Bergman, Antonioni, Godard. When I was little, in the Bronx, I didn't go to the cinema, and I didn't think of the American films I saw as works of art. Perhaps, in an indirect way, cinema allowed me to become a writer." He also credits his parents' leniency and acceptance of his desire to write for encouraging him to pursue a literary career: "They ultimately trusted me to follow the course I'd chosen. This is something that happens if you're the eldest son in an Italian family: You get a certain leeway, and it worked in my case."
Works
1970s
DeLillo's inaugural decade of novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing and publication of six novels between 1971 and 1978.
DeLillo resigned from the advertising industry in 1964, moved into a modest apartment near the Queens–Midtown Tunnel ("It wasn't Paris in the 1920s, but I was happy"), and began work on his first novel. Of the early days of his writing career, he remarked: "I lived in a very minimal kind of way. My telephone would be $4.20 every month. I was paying a rent of sixty dollars a month. And I was becoming a writer. So in one sense, I was ignoring the movements of the time." His first novel, Americana, was written over four years and finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. It concerned "a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture".
DeLillo revised the novel in 1989 for paperback reprinting. Reflecting on the novel later in his career, he said, "I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published." Later still, DeLillo continued to feel a degree of surprise that Americana was published: "I was working on my first novel, Americana, for two years before I ever realized that I could be a writer [...] I had absolutely no assurance that this book would be published because I knew that there were elements that I simply didn't know how to improve at that point. So I wrote for another two years and finished the novel. It wasn't all that difficult to find a publisher, to my astonishment. I didn't have a representative. I didn't know anything about publishing. But an editor at Houghton Mifflin read the manuscript and decided that this was worth pursuing."
Americana was followed in rapid succession by the American college football/nuclear war black comedy End Zone (1972)—written under the working titles "The Self-Erasing Word" and "Modes of Disaster Technology"—and the rock and roll satire Great Jones Street (1973), which DeLillo later felt was "one of the books I wish I'd done differently. It should be tighter, and probably a little funnier."
DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976)—which according to DeLillo is "structure[d] [...] on the writings of Lewis Carroll, in particular Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass—took two years to write and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon. This "conceptual monster", as DeLillo scholar Tom LeClair has called it, is "the picaresque story of a 14-year-old math genius who joins an international consortium of mad scientists decoding an alien message." DeLillo has said it was both one of the most difficult books for him to write and his personal favorite.
1980s
The beginning of the 1980s saw the most unusual and uncharacteristic publication in DeLillo's career. The sports novel Amazons, a mock memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, is a far more lighthearted novel than his previous others. DeLillo published the novel under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and later requested publishers compiling a bibliography for a reprint of a later novel to expunge the novel from their lists.
While DeLillo was living in Greece, he took three years to write The Names (1982), a complex thriller about "a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East". While lauded by an increasing number of critics, DeLillo was still relatively unknown outside small academic circles and did not reach a wide readership with this novel. Also in 1982, DeLillo finally broke his self-imposed ban on media coverage by giving his first major interview to Tom LeClair, who had first tracked DeLillo down for an interview while he was in Greece in 1979. On that occasion, DeLillo handed LeClair a business card with his name printed on it and beneath that the message "I don't want to talk about it."
With the 1985 publication of his eighth novel, White Noise, DeLillo rapidly became a noted and respected novelist. White Noise was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award for Fiction and a place in the canon of contemporary postmodern novelists. DeLillo remained as detached as ever from his growing reputation: when called upon to give an acceptance speech for the award, he simply said, "I'm sorry I couldn't be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming," and then sat down.
White Noise's influence can be seen in the writing of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of the novel). Among the 39 proposed titles for the novel were "All Souls", "Ultrasonic", "The American Book of the Dead", "Psychic Data" and "Mein Kampf". In 2005 DeLillo said "White Noise" was a fine choice, adding, "Once a title is affixed to a book, it becomes as indelible as a sentence or a paragraph."
DeLillo followed White Noise with Libra (1988), a speculative fictionalized life of Lee Harvey Oswald up to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. DeLillo undertook a vast research project, which included reading at least half of the Warren Commission report (which DeLillo called "the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel. This is the one document that captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event, despite the fact that it omits about a ton and a half of material.") Written with the working titles "American Blood" and "Texas School Book", Libra became an international bestseller, one of five finalists for the National Book Award, and the winner of the next year's Irish Times Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize.
1990s
DeLillo's concerns about the position of the novelist and the novel in a media- and terrorist-dominated society were made clear in his next novel, Mao II (1991). Influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie and the intrusion of the press into the life of J. D. Salinger, Mao II earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, John Banville and Thomas Pynchon. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992.
Following Mao II, DeLillo went underground and spent several years writing and researching his 11th novel. In 1992, he published the folio short story "Pafko at the Wall" in Harper's Magazine. The piece recounts Bobby Thomson's Shot Heard 'Round the World from the perspective of various witnesses, real and fictional. He told The Paris Review, "Sometime in late 1991, I started writing something new and didn't know what it would be – a novel, a short story, a long story. It was simply a piece of writing, and it gave me more pleasure than any other writing I've done. It turned into a novella, Pafko at the Wall, and it appeared in Harper's about a year after I started it. At some point I decided I wasn't finished with the piece. I was sending signals into space and getting echoes back, like a dolphin or a bat. So the piece, slightly altered, is now the prologue to a novel-in-progress, which will have a different title. And the pleasure has long since faded into the slogging reality of the no man's land of the long novel. But I'm still hearing the echoes."
This would become the prologue of his epic Cold War history Underworld. DeLillo took inspiration from the October 4, 1951, front page of The New York Times, which juxtaposed Thomson's home-run alongside the news that the Soviet Union had tested a hydrogen bomb. The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic Martin Amis saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer." Harold Bloom called it "the culmination of what Don can do."
Underworld went on to become one of DeLillo's most acclaimed novels to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book Award and The New York Times Best Books of the Year in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998. The novel won the 1998 American Book Award and the William Dean Howells Medal in 2000.
DeLillo later expressed surprise at Underworld's success. In 2007, he remarked: "When I finished with Underworld, I didn't really have any all-too-great hopes, to be honest. It's some pretty complicated stuff: 800 pages, more than 100 different characters—who's going to be interested in that?" After rereading it in 2010, over ten years after its publication, DeLillo said that rereading it "made me wonder whether I would be capable of that kind of writing now—the range and scope of it. There are certain parts of the book where the exuberance, the extravagance, I don't know, the overindulgence....There are city scenes in New York that seem to transcend reality in a certain way."
2000s
Although they have received some acclaim in places, DeLillo's post-Underworld novels have been often viewed by critics as "disappointing and slight, especially when held up against his earlier, big-canvas epics", marking a shift "away from sweeping, era-defining novels" such as White Noise, Libra and Underworld to a more "spare and oblique" style, characterized by "decreased length, the decommissioning of plot machinery and the steep deceleration of narrative time".
DeLillo has said of this shift to shorter novels, "If a longer novel announces itself, I'll write it. A novel creates its own structure and develops its own terms. I tend to follow. And I never try to stretch what I sense is a compact book." In a March 2010 interview, it was reported that DeLillo's deliberate stylistic shift had been informed by his having recently reread several slim but seminal European novels, including Albert Camus's The Stranger, Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene.
After the publication and extensive publicity drive for Underworld, DeLillo once again retreated from the spotlight to write his 12th novel, surfacing with The Body Artist in 2001. The novel has many established DeLillo preoccupations, particularly its interest in performance art and domestic privacies in relation to the wider scope of events. But it is very different in style and tone from the epic history of Underworld, and met with mixed critical reception.
DeLillo followed The Body Artist with 2003's Cosmopolis, a modern reinterpretation of James Joyce's Ulysses transposed to New York around the time of the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000. The novel was met at the time with a largely negative reception from critics, with several high-profile critics and novelists—notably John Updike—voicing their objections to its style and tone.
When asked in 2005 how he felt about the novel's mixed reception compared to the broader positive consensus afforded to Underworld, DeLillo remarked: "I try to stay detached from that aspect of my work as a writer. I didn't read any reviews or articles. Maybe it [the negative reception] was connected to September 11. I'd almost finished writing the book when the attacks took place, and so they couldn't have had any influence on the book's conception, nor on its writing. Perhaps for certain readers this upset their expectations." Critical opinions have since been revised, the novel latterly being seen as prescient for its focus on the flaws and weaknesses of the international financial system and cybercapital.
2010s
DeLillo published Point Omega, his 15th novel, in February 2010. According to DeLillo, the novel considers an idea from "the writing of the Jesuit thinker and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin." The Omega Point of the title "[is] the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable." Point Omega is DeLillo's shortest novel to date, and he has said it could be considered a companion piece to The Body Artist: "In its reflections on time and loss, this may be a philosophical novel and maybe, considering its themes, the book shares a place in my work with The Body Artist, another novel of abbreviated length."
Reviews were polarized, with some saying the novel was a return to form and innovative, while others complained about its brevity and lack of plot and engaging characters. Upon its initial release, Point Omega spent one week on The New York Times Best Seller list, peaking at No. 35 on the extended version of the list during its one-week stay on the list.
In a January 29, 2010, interview with The Wall Street Journal, DeLillo discussed at great length Point Omega, his views of writing, and his plans for the future. When asked why his recent novels had been shorter, DeLillo replied, "Each book tells me what it wants or what it is, and I'd be perfectly content to write another long novel. It just has to happen." While DeLillo is open to the idea of returning to the form of the long novel, the interview also revealed that he had no interest in doing as many of his literary contemporaries have done and writing a memoir. DeLillo also made some observations on the state of literature and the challenges facing young writers:
It's tougher to be a young writer today than when I was a young writer. I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published. I don't think publishers have that kind of tolerance these days, and I guess possibly as a result, more writers go to writing class now than then. I think first, fiction, and second, novels, are much more refined in terms of language, but they may tend to be too well behaved, almost in response to the narrower market.
2020s
DeLillo's 17th novel, The Silence, was published by Scribner in October 2020. In February 2021, producer Uri Singer acquired the rights to the novel; later the same year, reports emerged that the playwright Jez Butterworth was planning to adapt The Silence for the screen.
The first Library of America volume of DeLillo's writings was published in October 2022. The volume, titled Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s, collects the three major works DeLillo published during the decade: The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), and Libra (1988). The volume also features two nonfiction essays by DeLillo: "American Blood", about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Jack Ruby, and "Silhouette City", about neo-Nazis in contemporary America. It was edited by the DeLillo scholar Mark Osteen. Mao II and Underworld were anthologized in 2023. He is one of a handful of authors so anthologized while alive; others include Eudora Welty, Philip Roth and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Plays
Since 1979, in addition to his novels and occasional essays, DeLillo has been active as a playwright. To date, he has written five major plays: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (1986), Valparaiso (1999), Love Lies Bleeding (2006), and, most recently, The Word For Snow (2007). Stage adaptations have also been written for DeLillo's novels Libra and Mao II.
Of his work as a playwright, DeLillo has said that he feels his plays are not influenced by the same writers as his novels: "I'm not sure who influenced me [as a playwright]. I've seen some reviews that mention Beckett and Pinter, but I don't know what to say about that. I don't feel it myself."
Themes and criticism
DeLillo's work displays elements of both modernism and postmodernism. (Though it is worth noting that DeLillo himself claims not to know if his work is postmodern: "It is not [postmodern]. I'm the last guy to ask. If I had to classify myself, it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.") He has said the primary influences on his work and development are "abstract expressionism, foreign films, and jazz." Many of DeLillo's books (notably White Noise) satirize academia and explore postmodern themes of rampant consumerism, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence. Elsewhere, when asked about being labeled postmodern, DeLillo said: "I don't react. But I'd prefer not to be labeled. I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist."
In several of his novels, DeLillo explores the idea of the increasing visibility and effectiveness of terrorists as societal actors and, consequently, the displacement of what he views to be artists', and particularly novelists', traditional role in facilitating social discourse (Players, Mao II, Falling Man). Another recurring theme in DeLillo's books is the saturation of mass media and its role in forming simulacra, resulting in the removal of an event from its context and the consequent draining of meaning (see the highway shooter in Underworld, the televised disasters longed for in White Noise, the planes in Falling Man, the evolving story of the interviewee in Valparaiso). The psychology of crowds and the capitulation of individuals to group identity is a theme DeLillo examines in several of his novels, especially in the prologue to Underworld, Mao II, and Falling Man. In a 1993 interview with Maria Nadotti, DeLillo explained
My book (Mao II), in a way, is asking who is speaking to these people. Is it the writer who traditionally thought he could influence the imagination of his contemporaries or is it the totalitarian leader, the military man, the terrorist, those who are twisted by power and who seem capable of imposing their vision on the world, reducing the earth to a place of danger and anger. Things have changed a lot in recent years. One doesn't step onto an airplane in the same spirit as one did ten years ago: it's all different and this change has insinuated itself into our consciousness with the same force with which it insinuated itself into the visions of Beckett or Kafka.
Personal life
DeLillo lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville with his wife, Barbara Bennett. DeLillo married Bennett, a former banker turned landscape designer, in 1975; the couple do not have any children.
In popular culture
The narration in Johan Grimonprez's 1997 film Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y, which presents a history of mainstream television coverage of airplane hijackings, consists of passages from Mao II and White Noise.
A fictionalized version of a younger, pre-fame DeLillo during his career as an advertising copywriter in New York, appears briefly as a minor character in David Bowman's posthumous third novel Big Bang (2019).
Emma Cline's short story "White Noise", published June 1, 2020, by The New Yorker, features a character who may or may not be based on DeLillo. Harvey, the central character of the story and a fictionalized version of Harvey Weinstein, believes his neighbor is Don DeLillo and fantasizes about the two of them collaborating on a film version of White Noise.
Works
Novels
Americana (1971)
End Zone (1972)
Great Jones Street (1973)
Ratner's Star (1976)
Players (1977)
Running Dog (1978)
Amazons (1980) (under pseudonym "Cleo Birdwell")
The Names (1982)
White Noise (1985)
Libra (1988)
Mao II (1991)
Underworld (1997)
The Body Artist (2001)
Cosmopolis (2003)
Falling Man (2007)
Point Omega (2010)
Zero K (2016)
The Silence (2020)
Short fiction
Collections
The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (2011)
Short stories
"The River Jordan" (1960) (First published in Epoch 10, No. 2 (Winter 1960), pp. 105–120)
"Take the "A" Train" (1962) (First published in Epoch 12, No. 1 (Spring 1962) pp. 9–25.)
"Spaghetti and Meatballs" (1965) (First published in Epoch 14, No. 3 (Spring 1965) pp. 244–250)
"Coming Sun.Mon.Tues." (1966) (First published in Kenyon Review 28, No. 3 (June 1966), pp. 391–394.)
"Baghdad Towers West" (1967) (First published in Epoch 17, No. 3 (Spring 1968), pp. 195–217.)
"The Uniforms" (1970) (First published in Carolina Quarterly 22, 1970, pp. 4–11.)
"In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century" (1971) (First published in Esquire, Dec. 1971, pp. 174–177, 243, 246.)
"Total Loss Weekend" (1972) (First published in Sports Illustrated, November 27, 1972, pp. 98–101+)
"Creation" (1979) (First published in Antaeus No. 33, Spring 1979, pp. 32–46.)
"The Sightings" (1979) (First published in Weekend Magazine (Summer Fiction Issue, out of Toronto), August 4, 1979, pp. 26–30.)
"Human Moments in World War III" (1983) (First published in Esquire, July 1983, pp. 118–126.)
Plays
Mother (1966)
The Engineer of Moonlight (1979)
The Day Room (first production 1986)
The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven (1990)
Game 6 (1991)
Libra (1994)
Valparaiso (first production 1999)
The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life (2000)
Love-Lies-Bleeding (first production 2005)
The Word for Snow (first production in 2007)
Screenplays
Game 6 (2005), the story of a playwright (played by Michael Keaton) and his obsession with the Boston Red Sox and the 1986 World Series, was written in the early 1990s, but wasn't produced until 2005, ironically one year after the Red Sox won their first World Series title in 86 years. To date, it is DeLillo's only work for film.
Essays and reporting
"American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK" (1983) (Published in Rolling Stone, December 8, 1983. DeLillo's first major published essay. Seen as signposting his interest in the JFK assassination that would ultimately lead to Libra)
"Salman Rushdie Defense" (1994) (Co-written with Paul Auster in defense of Salman Rushdie, following the announcement of a fatwa upon Rushdie after the publication of The Satanic Verses)
"The Artist Naked in a Cage" (1997) (A short piece ran in The New Yorker on May 26, 1997, pages 6–7. An address delivered on May 13, 1997, at the New York Public Library's event "Stand In for Wei Jingsheng.")
"The Power of History" (1997) (Published in the September 7, 1997, issue of the New York Times Magazine. Preceded the publication of Underworld and was viewed by many as a rationale for the novel)
"A History of the Writer Alone in a Room" (1999) (This piece is the acceptance address given by DeLillo on the occasion of being awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1999. A small pamphlet was printed with this address, an address by Scribner editor-in-chief Nan Graham, the Jury's Citation, and an address by Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. It was reprinted in a German translation in Die Zeit in 2001. The piece is in five numbered sections, and is about five pages long.)
"In the Ruins of the Future" (Dec 2001) (This short essay appeared in Harper's Magazine. It concerns the September 11 attacks, terrorism, and America and comprises eight numbered sections.)
"Remembrance". Granta (108 (Chicago)): 68–69. Autumn 2009.
Awards and award nominations
1979 – Guggenheim Fellowship
1984 – Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters
1985 – National Book Award (Fiction) for White Noise
1985 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1985) for White Noise
1988 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1988) for Libra
1988 – The New York Times Best Books of the Year (1988) for Libra
1988 – National Book Award finalist (Fiction) for Libra
1989 – Election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
1989 – Irish Times, Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for Libra
1992 – PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II
1992 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination for Mao II
1995 – Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award
1997 – National Book Award finalist (Fiction) for Underworld
1997 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1997) for Underworld
1997 – New York Times Best Books of the Year nominee for Underworld
1998 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination for Underworld