Don Delillo

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 television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism.

DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of ''White Noise'' brought him widespread recognition and won him the National Book Award for fiction. ''White Noise'' was followed in 1988 by ''Libra'', a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for ''Mao II'' in 1992 and for ''Underworld'' in 1998), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for ''Mao II'' in 1992 (receiving another PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for ''The Angel Esmeralda'' in 2012), won the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.

DeLillo had described his fiction as concerned with "living in dangerous times", and 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."

Early life and influences

DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in New York City and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family with ties to Molise, Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the 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."http://www.perival.com/delillo/delillo_panic_interview_2005.html 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."

After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1954 and from Fordham University in the Bronx with a bachelor's degree in communication arts in 1958, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he could not get one in publishing. He worked for five years as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather on Fifth Avenue, writing image ads for Sears Roebuck among others, working on "Print ads, very undistinguished accounts....I hadn't made the leap to television. I was just getting good at it when I left, in 1964."

DeLillo published his first short story in 1960—"The River Jordan", in ''Epoch'', Cornell University's literary magazine—and began to work on his first novel in 1966. Of the beginning of his writing career, DeLillo has said, "I did some short stories at that time but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore."
Reflecting in 1993 on his relatively late start in writing novels, DeLillo said, "I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn't ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn't have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this."

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.

He 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. ''Americana'' 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." He married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned landscape designer, in 1975.

DeLillo's fourth novel, ''Ratner's Star'' (1976)—which according to DeLillo is "structure ..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 of his novels.

Following this early attempt at a major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. '' Players'' (1977), originally conceived as "based on what could be called the intimacy of language—what people who live together really sound like", concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as the husband gets involved with a cell of domestic terrorists. Its 1978 successor, ''Running Dog'' (1978), written in four months, was a thriller about a hunt for a celluloid reel of Hitler's sexual exploits.

Of ''Running Dog'', DeLillo remarked, "What I was really getting at in ''Running Dog'' was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don't care about this so much anyway. This was something I felt characterized our lives at the time the book was written in the mid to late seventies. I think this was part of American consciousness then."

In 1978, DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Greece, where he wrote his next novels, ''Amazons'' and '' The Names''.

Of his first six novels and his rapid writing turnover later in his career, DeLillo said, "I wasn't learning to slow down and examine what I was doing more closely. I don't have regrets about that work, but I do think that if I had been a bit less hasty in starting each new book, I might have produced somewhat better work in the 1970s. My first novel took so long and was such an effort that once I was free of it, I almost became carefree in a sense and moved right through the decade, stopping, in a way, only at ''Ratner's Star'' (1976), which was an enormous challenge for me and probably a bigger challenge for the reader. But I slowed down in the 1980s and '90s." DeLillo has also acknowledged some of the weaknesses of his 1970s works, reflecting in 2007: "I knew I wasn't doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way."

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 and more evidently commercial novel than his previous and subsequent ones. 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 literary 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 Noises influence can be seen in the writing of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers

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