Don DeLillo

Donald Richard DeLillo, known as Don DeLillo, is an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist born in New York in 1936. His fiction examines American life from the Cold War to the twenty-first century, and he is regarded as one of the central figures of literary postmodernism. His significance lies in turning consumer culture, television, terrorism and faith in technology into the material of serious fiction.

Born in the Bronx to an Italian-American Catholic family, DeLillo grew up in a crowded household of eleven people. He has recalled spending most of his childhood outdoors, inventing games and pretending to be a radio baseball announcer. His grandmother, who lived in the United States for fifty years, never learned English. He graduated from Fordham University in 1958. While working as a parking attendant one summer, he discovered a habit of reading that would last his whole life, and his early influences included James Joyce, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Flannery O'Connor. He then spent five years as a copywriter at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather, a job that taught him to economise with words.

His first short story appeared in 1960 in the Cornell University literary magazine, and his first novel, Americana, took years to write and was published in 1971. Through the following decade he kept publishing, including Great Jones Street and Ratner's Star, a satire about a teenage maths prodigy who joins scientists trying to decode an alien message. Wider recognition came with White Noise in 1985, which won the National Book Award. He then wrote Libra, about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and Mao II, about terrorism and the writer's place in a media-saturated world.

With Underworld (1997), a historical novel that runs from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet, DeLillo produced what many critics regard as his major work. Afterwards his books became shorter and more meditative, drawing on the visual arts. Cosmopolis (2003) explored moral disorientation after 9/11, and David Cronenberg adapted it for the screen in 2012. His recurring themes include living in dangerous times, the inner life of culture and the pressures of power. His legacy is a sharp critical eye on consumption, surveillance and the loss of meaning, and a lasting influence on later writers who depict a world shaped by media.