DeLillo, Don

DeLillo, Don (dulil'ō) [key], 1936–, American novelist, b. New York City, grad. Fordham Univ. (1958). DeLillo is an accomplished prose stylist with a dark vision and mordant wit. In a steady stream of novels beginning with Americana (1971), he has explored the anomie and violence of contemporary America—rock music and drugs in Great Jones Street (1973), science and mathematics in Ratner's Star (1976), terrorism in Players (1977), spying in Running Dog (1978), and political corruption in The Names (1982). His White Noise (1985), the story of Hitler studies professor Jack Gladney and a meditation on the fear of death, was followed by Libra (1988), a fictional portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald and Mao II (1991), about CIA activities in Greece. DeLillo's longest, most complicated, and most highly praised novel is Underworld (1997). In its sweep of time from 1951 to 1992, its panorama of American characters and landscapes, and its uniquely descriptive language, it portrays the vastness and variety of the ways Americans lived in the mid- to late 20th cent. This brilliant behemoth was followed by two relatively minor works—The Body Artist (2001), a dark and brief quasi–ghost story, and Cosmopolis (2003), a satire focused on a Manhattan billionaire. His next novel, Falling Man (2007), details the effects of 9/11 on a middle-class Manhattanite who experienced the World Trade Center attack and on his estranged wife and son. DeLillo is also a playwright.

The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright © 2007, Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

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