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BIO
Don
DeLillo is the author of eleven novels, including UNDERWOLRD, WHITE
NOISE, LIBRA, and MAO II, and 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.
ARTICLE
He
is elusive and reclusive. He hands out engraved cards that say "I
don't want to talk about it." No one, outside of his close circle
of friends, knows where he lives. He refuses to review books or
teach writing seminars. 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. "When you try to unravel something
you've written," he says, "you belittle it in a way."
What do we know about Don DeLillo --- aside from the fact that he's
one of America's most brilliant contemporary novelists?
His parents were Italian immigrants --- when his father arrived
in the United States he was wearing shoes made of paper. 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 where, he says,
he "didn't study much of anything," but 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.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Over the past 20 years he has written 11 novels. Each explores some
facet of American culture, most often from its darker side. In various
books he has explored the concept of national identity (AMERICANA),
mathematics (RATNER'S STAR), college football and nuclear weapons
(END ZONE), the drug culture (GREAT JONES STREET), and the culture
of Americans living abroad (THE NAMES). More recently he has chronicled
the life of Lee Harvey Oswald in LIBRA, the perils of contemporary
society (MAO II), and examined industrial disaster in WHITE NOISE.
His most recent novel, UNDERWORLD, contemplates the underbelly of
American culture from multiple points of view.
His characters are obsessive and compulsive --- people in search
of order in a world that DeLillo portrays as disorderly and chaotic.
His novels are ingenious, startling, darkly comic, and not easily
forgotten. Reading them takes you on unusual, wondrous adventures
through American landscapes that you are unlikely to ever visit
again. Nor will you soon forget them.
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