Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936, New York, New York, U.S.) American novelist whose postmodernist works portray the anomie of an America cosseted by material excess and stupefied by empty mass culture and politics.

After his graduation from Fordham University, New York City (1958), DeLillo worked for several years as a copywriter at an advertising agency. His first novel, Americana (1971), is the story of a network television executive in search of the “real” America. It was followed by End Zone (1972) and Great Jones Street (1973). Ratner’s Star (1976) attracted critical attention with its baroque comic sense and verbal facility.

Beginning with Players (1977), DeLillo’s vision turned darker, and his characters became more willful in their destructiveness and ignorance. Critics found little to like in the novel’s protagonists but much to admire in DeLillo’s elliptical prose. The thrillers Running Dog (1978) and The Names (1982), which was set mostly in Greece, followed. White Noise (1985; film 2022), which won the National Book Award for fiction, tells of a professor of Hitler studies who is exposed to an “airborne toxic event”; he discovers that his wife is taking an experimental substance said to combat the fear of death, and he vows to obtain the drug for himself at any cost. In Libra (1988) DeLillo presented a fictional portrayal of Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy. Mao II (1991) opens with a mass wedding officiated by cult leader Sun Myung Moon and tells the story of a reclusive writer who becomes enmeshed in a world of political violence.

DeLillo received significant acclaim for the sprawling novel Underworld (1997), which provides a commentary on American history and culture in the Cold War era, in part by tracing the imagined journeys of the baseball that New York Giants outfielder Bobby Thomson hit for a pennant-winning home run in 1951. DeLillo’s subsequent works of fiction include The Body Artist (2001), about the supernatural experiences of a recent widow; Cosmopolis (2003; film 2012), set largely in a billionaire’s limousine as it moves across Manhattan; Falling Man (2007), which tells the story of a survivor of the September 11 attacks in 2001; Point Omega (2010), a meditation on time; and Zero K (2016), an investigation of cryogenics and human immortality. The Silence (2020) follows several people who attend a Super Bowl party during a worldwide calamitous event.

In addition to his novels, DeLillo wrote several plays, the screenplay to the independent film Game 6 (2005), and the short-story collection The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories (2011). He received the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013 and the National Book Awards Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2015.