Don DeLillo

Donald Richard DeLillo was born on 20 November 1936 in the Italian-American neighbourhood of the Belmont section of the Bronx, New York City. His parents were Italian immigrants. He grew up speaking Italian at home and English on the street, attended Cardinal Hayes High School and Fordham University (where he majored in communication arts), and spent his early working years in advertising — an experience that sensitized him to the way language is used to manipulate, seduce, and conceal.

Life and Career

DeLillo published his first novel, Americana (1971), at thirty-four — a late start that he has attributed to spending his twenties absorbing the modernist tradition: Joyce, Faulkner, jazz, abstract expressionism. Through the 1970s he published a novel roughly every two years — End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), Ratner’s Star (1976), Players (1977), Running Dog (1978) — each exploring a different facet of American institutional life: football, rock music, mathematics, terrorism, intelligence agencies. The novels were admired by a small audience and ignored by the mainstream.

The Names (1982), set among American expatriates in Greece, marked a deepening of ambition. White Noise (1985) was the breakthrough: the comic, terrifying novel of the “Airborne Toxic Event” and the Gladney family’s relationship with death, consumerism, and the white noise of American media culture won the National Book Award and established DeLillo as a major figure.

Libra (1988), a novelistic reconstruction of Lee Harvey Oswald’s life leading up to the Kennedy assassination, was DeLillo’s most controversial book and his most commercially successful novel before Underworld. Mao II (1991), a meditation on the relationship between the novelist and the terrorist in the modern world, won the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Underworld (1997) is DeLillo’s magnum opus: an 827-page novel that begins with Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” in 1951 and spans the entire second half of the American century, linking Cold War nuclear anxiety, waste management, the art world, and the hidden connections between systems. It is one of the most ambitious American novels of the postwar era.

DeLillo has continued to publish in the twenty-first century — The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007), Point Omega (2010), Zero K (2016), The Silence (2020) — in an increasingly compressed, enigmatic mode. He lives in New York.

Major Works and Themes

DeLillo’s fiction investigates the systems — technological, economic, political, linguistic — that structure American life and the paranoia, dread, and wonder they generate. His characters are surrounded by information they cannot process, threatened by forces they cannot see, and seduced by a consumer culture that promises meaning and delivers noise.

White Noise (1985) is the essential DeLillo: Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Studies, navigates suburban American life, the Airborne Toxic Event, and his wife’s secret use of a drug called Dylar that is supposed to cure the fear of death. The novel is simultaneously a campus comedy, a disaster novel, and a meditation on mortality in the age of mass media.

Underworld (1997) is the masterpiece: a novel of vast scope that connects the 1951 Giants-Dodgers playoff game, the Cuban missile crisis, J. Edgar Hoover’s secret life, a Texas waste-management tycoon, and a Bronx graffiti artist into a single, densely interwoven narrative. Its famous opening section — “The Triumph of Death,” set at the Polo Grounds — is one of the great virtuoso passages in American fiction.

Critical Reception and Legacy

DeLillo is now recognised as one of the most important American novelists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, alongside Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. He has received the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. He is a perennial Nobel Prize candidate.

His influence on contemporary American fiction — on writers like Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace, and Rachel Kushner — is substantial.

Key Works

• Americana (1971)
• End Zone (1972)
• Great Jones Street (1973)
• Ratner’s Star (1976)
• Players (1977)
• The Names (1982)
• White Noise (1985)
• Libra (1988)
• Mao II (1991)
• Underworld (1997)
• Cosmopolis (2003)
• Falling Man (2007)
• Zero K (2016)

Collecting DeLillo

Don DeLillo is one of the most collected living American novelists, with a devoted following among collectors of postmodern and contemporary fiction.

Americana (1971, Houghton Mifflin, Boston) is the first novel and the primary rarity. It was published in a small run and attracted little notice. Fine copies in the original dust jacket bring $2,000–$8,000.

White Noise (1985, Viking, New York) is the most sought-after DeLillo title. First editions in the original jacket bring $500–$2,000.

Underworld (1997, Scribner, New York) was published in both a trade edition and a signed limited edition of 1,000 copies. The signed limited edition, in a slipcase, brings $500–$1,500. The trade first edition in the jacket brings $100–$300.

Libra (1988, Viking) and Mao II (1991, Viking) first editions are collected at $200–$600.

DeLillo is a selective signer — he does not participate in public signings with great frequency — and signed copies carry a meaningful premium, particularly for the early novels. The signed limited editions of his major works (published by various fine presses) are the blue-chip items.

His papers are held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin — one of the major DeLillo archives.