A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: American novelist, DeLillo is an accomplished prose stylist with a dark vision and mordant wit. His parents were Italian immigrants. DeLillo was born in 1936 and grew up in the Fordham section of the Bronx. He spent his early years on the streets of New York, playing cards and shooting pool. He attended Fordham University and graduated with a degree in Communications. After college he worked for an advertising agency for about five years; then he quit and began writing novels. As a teenager, DeLillo wasn't interested in writing until taking a summer job as a parking attendant, when spending hours waiting and watching over vehicles led to a reading habit. Don DeLillo has published thirteen novels since 1971, along with several plays and numerous stories. In a steady stream of novels beginning with Americana (1971), about the spiritual search of a young television executive , he has explored the anomie and violence of contemporary America—rock music and drugs in Great Jones Street (1973), science and mathematics in Ratner’s Star (1976), terrorism in Players (1977), spying in Running Dog (1978), and political corruption in The Names (1982). Although Americana was not an autobiographical work, DeLillo drew more material from people and situations he knew firsthand than in End Zone (1972), which reflected fears of nuclear warfare, but examined the subject in the form of college football. In 1975 DeLillo married Barbara Bennett, then a banker; she eventually became a landscape designer. They have no children. After living in Bronx and Manhattan, they settled a half hour's train ride north of New York City. Starting in the late 1970s, he spent several years living in Greece, where he wrote The Names. While lauded by critics, his novels did not reach wide readership until the publication of the National Book Award-winning White Noise in 1985. White Noise, the story of Hitler studies professor Jack Gladney and a meditation on the fear of death, was followed by Libra (1988), a fictional portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald and Mao II (1991), about CIA activities in Greece. In 1999, DeLillo was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. His papers were acquired in 2004 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. His characters are obsessive and compulsive --- people in search of order in a world that DeLillo portrays as disorderly and chaotic. His novels relentlessly probe the postmodern American consciousness in all its neurotic permutations, offering a compelling and disturbing portrait of the contemporary American experience. DeLillo’s longest, most complicated, and most highly praised novel is Underworld (1997). In its sweep of time from 1951 to 1992, its panorama of American characters and landscapes, and its uniquely descriptive language, it portrays the vastness and variety of the ways Americans lived in the mid- to late 20th cent. This brilliant behemoth was followed by two relatively minor works— The Body Artist (2001), a dark and brief quasi–ghost story, and Cosmopolis (2003), a satire focused on a Manhattan billionaire. His novel Falling Man (2007), details the effects of 9/11 on a middle-class Manhattanite who experienced the World Trade Center attack and on his estranged wife and son. DeLillo is also a playwright Game 6, 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 90s, but wasn't produced until 2005. To date, it is DeLillo's only work for film. DeLillo is widely considered by modern critics to be one of the central figures of literary postmodernism. 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. Delillo has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Although not as reclusive as J. D. Salinger or Thomas Pynchon, DeLillo nevertheless rigorously maintains his privacy, commenting little on his life or work. No one, outside of his close circle of friends, knows where he lives. He has has avoided participating in the full-fledged book promotions common in the publishing industry, eschewing book signings, talk shows, and lectures. He does not speak spontaneously to the media, and grants few interviews. When he does allow himself to be interviewed, he refuses to discuss his work. DeLillo has been mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Many younger English-language authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace cite DeLillo as an influence. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy, though he questions the classification of DeLillo as a "postmodern novelist." |
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