in a Mediterranean theater backlit by fears of international terrorism, whereasWhite Noise returns to the United States and the oblique satire of the novelist’s earlier work: His narrator, the chairman of a university’s “Department of Hitler Studies,” veers into a personal nightmare of mass cultural life that miniaturizes the horrors of Nazism he has studied. It was DeLillo’s breakthrough novel, and with Libra it shares an ironic view of the complexities, responsibilities, and finally the limits of historiography. Libra’s framing character is a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operative trying impossibly to compose the story, twenty-five years after the fact, of Lee Harvey Oswald’s apparent assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Mao II represents the culmination of DeLillo’s third phase. Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist who serves as DeLillo’s alter ego, compares the function of the author and the terrorist in mass culture and wonders about the possibility of reclaiming individual identity from a civilization of crowds. In his short story “Pafko at the Wall,” published in Harper’s Magazine (October, 1992), DeLillo reminisces about the historic 1951 baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers at New York City’s Polo Grounds. These works focus on the human desire for order, or plot. As he writes in Libra, “The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death.”

That baseball game also surfaces as the opening scene in Underworld, which documents the effects of the Cold War on American culture, sweeping from 1951 to the 1990’s. The novel was nominated for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award in 1997, as well as garnering the Jerusalem Prize in 1999 and the William Dean Howells Medal from the National Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. In The Body Artist DeLillo forsakes his usual panoramic viewpoint to focus on a single life (and death). The protagonist is Lauren Hartke, whose husband Rey commits suicide in the opening pages of the novel. Lauren soon finds a strange young man living in her house who may, or may not, be Rey’s reincarnation, his ghost, or simply an idiot savant mimic. Cosmopolis focuses on the life of Eric Packer, a twenty-eight-year-old business tycoon whose slow transit across Manhattan in a limousine on a single day in April, 2000, encapsulates the Zeitgeist of the early twenty-first century.

For DeLillo’s protagonists, deconstructing this “deathward logic” of systematic thought typically ends in ambiguous attempts to reconstruct experience through childish modes of action. The Names concludes with the prelogical narrative of a gifted boy; White Noise concludes with the death-defying excursion of a preverbal toddler who rides his tricycle onto the freeway. In fact, children (or childish adults) loom large throughout DeLillo’s work. Oriented to seemingly rational, adult systems by way of games, whether local or global, a simple sport or a complex of international espionage, they discover codifications of rules and possibilities for simulating order and dominance—and language is the primal game. Always in DeLillo, therefore, when language fails, a kind of elemental violence follows. Out of this represented chaos or sacrificial terror, human history emerges.

Recognition of DeLillo’s importance was slow to come. For years his novels were widely praised by reviewers and a small group of academicians, but they were not commercial successes; the plays—The Engineer of Moonlight, The Day Room, and The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven—were ignored even by most critics. The turning point in his career came with White Noise, Libra, and Mao II, after which he became widely known as a major novelist in the generation that includes Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Joan Didion, Joseph McElroy, and Thomas Pynchon. DeLillo is particularly acclaimed for his inventiveness and his acute renderings of American speech and American consumer society.

Don DeLillo was born November 20, 1936, in the Bronx, a neighborhood in New York City, and is the son of Italian immigrants. While in high school, Delillo’s main interest was sports. DeLillo is not one of those people who were born knowing they would become writers one day.  He only became interested in literature after landing a summer job as a parking attendant and had nothing better to do with his time than read. Delillo claims he was a listless student, but he finally graduated in 1958 from Fordham University. Not sure what to do, but with a slight bent toward writing, DeLillo took on a job as an advertising copywriter, though he would have preferred to have found a job in publishing. He wrote a few short stories after college and slowly started thinking of himself as a writer only after he had spent a couple years trying to write a novel. In a 1997 article by Jonathan Bing for Publishers Weekly, DeLillo says that he “became a writer by avoiding serious commitment to anything else.”

Despite such lackluster beginnings, DeLillo has become one of the most important and acclaimed of American authors. DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, was published in 1971. As of 2007, he had written thirteen more. He has also written a few plays, a screenplay, and an assortment of short stories and essays.

Delillo's oeuvre has won him a tremendous following. Reviewers and scholars love to dig into DeLillo’s works because there are so many complexities to explore. Additionally, there is a Don DeLillo Society, whose aim is to help Don DeLillo scholars. There is even a discussion on how to pronounce the author’s name.

DeLillo married Barbara Bennet in 1975. Together they have traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East. Besides the personal affect of being a lifelong New Yorker, DeLillo says that the travels with his wife have significantly affected his writing. He also credits the influence of jazz, foreign movies, and abstract expressionism as sources of inspiration. Some of the topics of pop culture that DeLillo has explored include football in his novel End Zone (1972), Lee Harvey Oswald (accused assassin of John F. Kennedy) in Libra (1988), baseball and rampant consumerism in Underworld (1997), and the life of a typically rich American man in Cosmopolis (2003). DeLillo’s White Noise, a story about the numbing affect of watching too much television, won the 1985 National Book Award.