Don DeLillo

Born in 1936 in the Fordham section of the Bronx to Italian immigrant parents, Don DeLillo grew up in a crowded neighborhood where the rhythms of street life and the noise of postwar America seeped into his ear for dialogue. He attended Fordham University, worked as a copywriter at an advertising agency, and quit in his late twenties to write fiction, spending five years on his debut novel, Americana (1971). Through the 1970s and early 1980s he published prolifically but in relative obscurity, producing dark, cerebral novels including Great Jones Street (1973), Ratner's Star (1976), and The Names (1982). White Noise (1985), a satire of consumerism, academic absurdity, and the American terror of death, won the National Book Award and made his reputation. Libra (1988), a fictional meditation on Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination, confirmed him as the preeminent novelist of American paranoia. His magnum opus, Underworld (1997), opens with a legendary prologue set at the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff game and sprawls across five decades of Cold War America in 827 pages. DeLillo became the novelist to whom other novelists looked when they wanted to understand how fiction could absorb the white noise of technology, terrorism, and capital that defines contemporary life.

At eighteen, a Bronx kid with no thought of writing, DeLillo took a summer job as a parking attendant. The long idle hours turned into a reading habit. He worked through Faulkner, then Joyce, and somewhere in those pages found the radiance in language that would decide the rest of his life.