Don DeLillo

Author

• Born: November 20, 1936
• Place of Birth: Bronx, New York

Biography

The author of challenging novels about contemporary mass culture, Don DeLillo is among the most important American fiction writers of the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century. Born and raised in the Bronx in New York City, he received a Bachelor of Arts from Fordham University in 1958. Details of his life from then until the publication of Americana in 1971 are limited, as DeLillo guarded his privacy and granted few interviews. His first published story appeared in 1960, and during the subsequent decade, six additional short stories appeared in major literary journals like Epoch and The Kenyon Review and in such magazines as Esquire. During the 1980s, DeLillo won several major awards, including a 1984 Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a 1985 American Book Award for White Noise (1985), and a 1988 American Book Award nomination for Libra (1988), and a PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II (1991).

DeLillo, who was reared in a Catholic environment and educated at a Jesuit university, writes fiction that is concerned with the secularization of myth and ritual in a mass culture. He works in a tradition of American novel writing that extends from Nathanael West to Robert Coover and Thomas Pynchon, with whom he is often compared. Each of his novels decodes a particular system by which contemporary human beings seek the comfort of a totalizing order but always amid the onslaught of entropic, catastrophic forces. DeLillo focuses on complex thought structures colliding with life’s ultimacies: randomness, the arbitrariness of language, violence, and death. These clashes are typically staged in tableaux of sacrificial violence that eerily mimes the entropies of nature, an ironic reminder that human rage for order contains the seeds of that very disorder that is intended to be surmounted.

DeLillo’s career has unfolded in phases. The first, in which he published three novels in as many years, concerns the ordering technologies of American mass culture: cinematography in Americana (1971), sports in End Zone (1972), and popular music in Great Jones Street (1973). All three novels are notable for their satire on the absurdities and paranoia of life in Middle America. In each, the first-person narration and episodic plotting bring into play a large cast of secondary characters; also, in each, the protagonists seek more authentic versions of themselves in exile from mass culture, only to reenter it out of resignation and with an idea of subverting its discourses.

When Ratner’s Star (1976) appeared after a three-year hiatus, nothing in DeLillo’s previous novels had prepared readers for the depth and breadth of its scientific allusions. His longest and most ambitious work before Libra, Ratner’s Star focuses on a fourteen-year-old Nobel Prize recipient in mathematics assigned to decode an extraterrestrial signal from a planet circling Ratner’s star. Working at the Center for the Refinement of Ideational Structures, Billy Twillig is surrounded by a huge cast of eccentrics who can be read as part of a vast, Menippean satire on contemporary theoretical science. The critic Tom LeClair has also shown that the novel is elaborately plotted around both a history of mathematics and a dyadic structure of chapters. Indeed, DeLillo’s next two novels can also be read as paired opposites: In Players (1977), adults engage in degenerative, childish games of espionage and sexual liberation; in Running Dog (1978), this play is displaced by the strictest technologies of patriarchal power.

In his third phase, DeLillo turns more explicitly to the rites of power and sacrifice embedded in contemporary society. The Names (1982) focuses on a mystical cult of exiled Americans operating in a Mediterranean theater backlit by fears of international terrorism. In contrast, White Noise returns to the United States and the oblique satire of the novelist’s earlier work: His narrator, the chairperson of a university’s “Department of Hitler Studies,” veers into a personal nightmare of mass cultural life that miniaturizes the horrors of Nazism he has studied. It was DeLillo’s breakthrough novel, and with Libra, it shares an ironic view of the complexities, responsibilities, and, finally, the limits of historiography. Libra’s framing character is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative trying impossibly to compose the story, twenty-five years after the fact, of Lee Harvey Oswald’s apparent assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Mao II represents the culmination of DeLillo’s third phase. Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist who serves as DeLillo’s alter ego, compares the function of the author and the terrorist in mass culture and wonders about the possibility of reclaiming individual identity from a civilization of crowds. In his short story “Pafko at the Wall,” published in Harper’s Magazine in October 1992, DeLillo reminisces about the historic 1951 baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers at New York City’s Polo Grounds. These works focus on the human desire for order, or plot. As he writes in Libra, “The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death.”

That baseball game also surfaces as the opening scene in Underworld (1997), which documents the effects of the Cold War on American culture, sweeping from 1951 to the 1990s. The novel was nominated for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997, as well as garnering the Jerusalem Prize in 1999 and the William Dean Howells Medal from the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. In The Body Artist (2001), DeLillo forsakes his usual panoramic viewpoint to focus on a single life (and death). The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, whose husband Rey commits suicide in the opening pages of the novel. Lauren soon finds a strange young man living in her house who may or may not be Rey’s reincarnation, his ghost, or simply a person with savant syndrome. Cosmopolis (2003) focuses on the life of Eric Packer, a twenty-eight-year-old business tycoon whose slow transit across Manhattan in a limousine on a single day in April 2000 encapsulates the Zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century.

DeLillo's only screenplay, Game 6 (2005), also concerns baseball. It follows a Red Sox–obsessed playwright who has a new play opening on the same night that the team will play in the crucial sixth game of the 1986 World Series. The screenplay was written in 1991 but not filmed until over a decade later. Critical reception was mixed.

For DeLillo’s protagonists, deconstructing this “deathward logic” of systematic thought typically ends in ambiguous attempts to reconstruct experience through childish modes of action. The Names (1982) concludes with the prelogical narrative of a gifted boy; White Noise concludes with the death-defying excursion of a preverbal toddler who rides his tricycle onto the freeway. Children (or childish adults) loom large throughout DeLillo’s work. Oriented to seemingly rational, adult systems through games, whether local or global, a simple sport or a complex of international espionage, they discover codifications of rules and possibilities for simulating order and dominance—and language is the primal game. Always in DeLillo, therefore, when language fails, a kind of elemental violence follows. Out of this represented chaos or sacrificial terror, human history emerges.

The 2007 novel Falling Man is the story of a survivor of September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center; the protagonist, a lawyer named Keith Neudecker, is only slightly injured physically but finds the emotional trauma more difficult to recover from. After attempting to resume his old life, Keith becomes a full-time professional poker player. The novel deals with themes of reinventing individual identity and media portrayal of terrorist violence. Falling Man was followed by 2010's Point Omega, a short novel about Richard Elster, an aging former adviser to the Pentagon on the Iraq War, who retires to the deserts of the Southwestern United States. He is joined there by his daughter, Jessie, and by Jim Finley, a filmmaker who wants to convince him to take part in a film; the three form a kind of family until Jessie disappears. Zero K (2016) concerns a billionaire who, when his wife is diagnosed with a terminal illness, seeks to have himself and her cryogenically preserved until medical technology can cure her. In 2020, DeLillo published The Silence, a short novel.

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, DeLillo's first short story collection, collects nine stories published between 1979 and 2011—a little less than half of the twenty short stories he had published in various magazines at that point in his career. The collection was generally well-received. The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (2011) is DeLillo's first short story collection. It collects nine stories published between 1979 and 2011—a little less than half of the twenty short stories he had published in various magazines at that point in his career. The collection was generally well received. Delillo continued to publish short stories in The New Yorker, including "Sine cosine tangent" in February 2016 and "The Itch" in July 2017.

Recognition of DeLillo’s importance was slow to come. For years, his novels were widely praised by reviewers and a small group of academicians, but they were not commercial successes; the plays—The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (1986), and The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven (1990)—were ignored even by most critics. The turning point in his career came with White Noise, Libra, and Mao II, after which he became widely known as a prominent novelist in the generation that includes Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Joan Didion, Joseph McElroy, and Thomas Pynchon. DeLillo is acclaimed for his inventiveness and acute renderings of American speech and consumer society.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Americana, 1971

End Zone, 1972

Great Jones Street, 1973

Ratner’s Star, 1976

Players, 1977

Running Dog, 1978

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:

The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, 2011

Drama:

The Engineer of Moonlight, pb. 1979

The Day Room, pr. 1986

The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven, pb. 1990

Valparaiso, pb. 1999

Love-Lies-Bleeding, pr. 2005

The Word for Snow, pr. 2007

Screenplays

Game 6, 2005

Bibliography

Begley, Adam, and Ismail Kadare. “Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135.” The Paris Review, 1993, www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Bizzini, Silvia Caporale. “Can the Intellectual Still Speak? The Example of Don DeLillo’s Mao II.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 37, no. 2, summer 1995, pp. 104-117.

Bloom, Harold, editor. Don DeLillo’s “White Noise.” New York: Chelsea House, 2002.

Bryant, Paula. “Discussing the Untellable: Don DeLillo’s The Names.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 29, fall 1987, pp. 16-29.

Carmichael, Thomas. “Lee Harvey Oswald and the Postmodern Subject: History and Intertextuality in Don DeLillo’s Libra, The Names, and Mao II.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 34, no. 2, summer 1993, pp. 204-218.

Civello, Paul. American Literary Naturalism and Its Twentieth-Century Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Cowles, Gregory. “Don DeLillo’s Best Books: A Guide.” The New York Times, 22 May 2024, www.nytimes.com/article/don-delillo-best-books.html. Accessed 23 July 2024.

Dewey, Joseph, Steven G. Kellman, and Irving Mallen, editors. Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo’s “Underworld.” Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002.

LeClair, Tom. In the Loop: Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1987.

Mullen, Bill. “No There There: Cultural Criticism as Lost Object in Don DeLillo’s Players and Running Dog.” In Powerless Fictions? Ethics, Cultural Critique, and American Fiction in the Age of Postmodernism, edited by Ricardo Miguel Alfonso. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.

Nadeau, Robert L. “Don DeLillo.” In Readings from the New Book on Nature: Physics and Metaphysics in the Modern Novel. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1981.

Oriard, Michael. “Don DeLillo’s Search for Walden Pond.” Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, vol. 20, no. 1, 1978, pp. 5-24.

Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Ruppersburg, Hugh, and Tim Engles, editors. Critical Essays on Don DeLillo. New York: G. K. Hall, 2000.

Self, John. “Why Don DeLillo is America's greatest living writer.” BBC, 19 Dec. 2022, www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221213-why-don-delillo-is-americas-greatest-living-writer. Accessed 23 July 2024.