Don DeLillo

Eleven people lived in the small Bronx house near Arthur Avenue, a Catholic Italian family in which English and Italian ran together in every room. DeLillo's grandmother spent 50 years in America without learning English. He finished Cardinal Hayes High School in 1954 and Jesuit-run Fordham in 1958 with a degree in communication arts, then took an advertising job because publishing would not hire him — five years as a copywriter at Ogilvy and Mather on Fifth Avenue, writing print ads for Sears Roebuck and accounts he called very undistinguished. He quit in 1964 and said later that he quit just to quit — he did not want to work anymore. He took a cheap room near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and spent four years on his first novel.

Americana appeared in 1971. Then End Zone, Great Jones Street, Ratner's Star — six novels in eight years, admired by a small readership and almost nobody else. White Noise changed that in 1985 and took the National Book Award: the airborne toxic event, the supermarket aisles, a professor of Hitler studies who cannot speak German. Libra followed in 1988, a fictionalized life of Lee Harvey Oswald built partly out of the Warren Commission report. Then Underworld in 1997, which opens at the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff game and runs backward through the Cold War.

What he actually writes about is narrow and consistent: crowds, media saturation, terrorism, the language of consumption, conspiracy, and the way disaster becomes footage. The objections are consistent too — that the characters are mouthpieces rather than people, and that the prose is cold. Bruce Bawer called the books tracts rather than novels. B. R. Myers gave a chapter of A Reader's Manifesto to arguing they are banal ideas badly written. George Will, in The Washington Post, called Libra an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship. DeLillo replied that being called a bad citizen is a compliment, that the novel is a form of dissent against power, the state and the corporation. Critics have since read the 1980s and 1990s books as prescient about September 11 — a framing DeLillo has never claimed for himself.

Falling Man came in 2007, an intimate family story inside the September 11 attacks, and it divided reviewers who had expected him to be the one writer equal to the event. The late books are short — The Body Artist, Cosmopolis, Point Omega, Zero K, The Silence — and critics who wanted the era-defining novels have called them slight. The awards kept coming. The Jerusalem Prize in 1999, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award in 2010, the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013, the National Book Foundation medal in 2015, Library of America volumes while he is alive to see them. He is 89. He has never announced a last book, and the verdict is open.

Don DeLillo's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Americana book
  First novel, four years in the writing 1971
• White Noise book
  National Book Award for Fiction 1985
• Libra book
  Lee Harvey Oswald, and the fight it started 1988
• Mao II book
  PEN/Faulkner Award, 1992 1991
• Underworld book
  800 pages running backward through the Cold War 1997
• Falling Man book
  One family inside the September 11 attacks 2007

• 1958 aged ~22 Graduates from Fordham with a degree in communication arts He wanted publishing and could not get hired.
• 1964 aged ~28 Quits Ogilvy and Mather after five years writing print ads He said he quit to quit, not to write fiction.
• 1971 aged ~35 Publishes Americana, his first novel
• 1975 aged ~39 Marries Barbara Bennett A banker who became a landscape designer. They have no children.
• 1985 aged ~49 White Noise wins the National Book Award for Fiction His acceptance speech was two sentences long.
• 1988 aged ~52 Libra becomes a bestseller and a public argument George Will called it an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.
• 1997 aged ~61 Publishes Underworld It grew out of a 1992 novella about the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff game.
• April 26, 2013 aged 76 Named the first winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction He dedicated it to his immigrant parents.
• November 8, 2015 aged 78 Receives the National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution Presented by Jennifer Egan.

• Lee Harvey Oswald 1939–1963
  Assassinated President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963 wrote about
• William Gaddis 1922–1998
  Novelist of The Recognitions and J R influenced by
• Thomas Pynchon b. 1937
  The great American postmodern novelist, who has not been photographed in public since the 1950s. compared to
• David Foster Wallace 1962–2008
  Novelist and essayist whose Infinite Jest became a defining postmodern American novel. influenced
• Philip Roth 1933–2018
  Novelist whose explorations of Jewish American identity and sexuality earned him a Pulitzer Prize. rival