Underworld was published by Scribner, New York, on 22 September 1997, in a first printing of approximately 100,000 copies priced at $27.50. The novel was immediately recognised as DeLillo’s masterpiece — a vast, architecturally complex work that attempted nothing less than a portrait of Cold War America from 1951 to the 1990s. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and has grown steadily in critical estimation since publication.
The Novel
The novel opens with its most celebrated section — the prologue “The Triumph of Death,” which recreates the third game of the 1951 National League playoff between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, culminating in Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World.” In the stands are Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, and a fictional thirteen-year-old Black kid named Cotter Martin who catches the home run ball. Simultaneously, news reaches Hoover that the Soviet Union has tested an atomic bomb. These twin events — the ball game and the bomb — generate the novel’s double helix: the public spectacle and the hidden threat, the surface and the underworld.
The narrative moves backward from the 1990s to the 1950s, following the baseball through a series of owners while tracking Nick Shay — a waste management executive with a buried past (he killed a man at seventeen) — and a vast cast of characters whose lives intersect around nuclear weapons, garbage, art, baseball, and the secret networks of American power.
DeLillo’s prose here is at its most various and sustained — moving between high lyricism (the baseball scenes), cold precision (the weapons sequences), domestic realism (the Bronx sections), and visionary intensity (the art installations). The novel argues that waste — physical, nuclear, historical — is the true product of the Cold War; that what we throw away defines us more than what we keep.
Collecting Underworld
First edition (1997, Scribner): Approximately 100,000 copies, priced at $27.50.
Identification points:
- “1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2” number line (first printing ends in “1” when reading properly)
- Published by Scribner
- Black cloth boards with silver lettering
First edition, first printing:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Signed: $300–$800
The large first printing makes unsigned copies common and affordable. Collecting interest is primarily in signed copies and in the limited edition.
Signed limited edition: Scribner issued a signed, limited edition of approximately 1,500 copies in a slipcase: $300–$800.
Value trajectory (2016–2026): Modest appreciation for unsigned copies (approximately 1.3×). Signed copies have appreciated more significantly as DeLillo’s canonical status solidifies.
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate continued appreciation. The enormous first printing limits scarcity for unsigned copies, but Underworld’s growing reputation as the American novel of the Cold War — comparable in ambition to Gravity’s Rainbow and Moby-Dick — should push signed copies to $1,500–$3,000 and fine unsigned copies to $300–$600.
The Prologue: “The Triumph of Death”
The fifty-page prologue was published separately in Harper’s magazine in 1992 as “Pafko at the Wall” and is widely considered one of the finest individual pieces of writing in postwar American literature. DeLillo recreates the 1951 playoff game with a specificity that borders on the hallucinatory: the arc of Thomson’s home run, the reaction of each spectator, the confetti falling from the stands (including a torn reproduction of Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death, which lands on Hoover’s shoulder). The simultaneous announcement of the Soviet bomb test creates a double consciousness that structures the entire novel: baseball and the bomb, spectacle and secret, the surface event and the underground reality.
The novel’s central metaphor is waste — garbage, nuclear waste, human waste, wasted lives, wasted time. Nick Shay works in waste management; his company handles the garbage that American consumer culture produces in staggering quantities. The nuclear weapons that define the Cold War are themselves a form of waste: unusable, undeployable, stored underground in facilities that must be maintained for centuries. The underground artist Klara Sax paints decommissioned B-52 bombers in the desert, transforming military waste into art. DeLillo argues that waste is the Cold War’s true legacy — not victory or defeat but the accumulated residue of half a century of fear and consumption.
Critical Reception
Underworld was received as a major event. The New York Times ran a front-page review. Martin Amis called it “a great American novel, a masterwork.” Harold Bloom, who generally disliked postmodern fiction, praised it. The novel was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize but won neither — an outcome that many critics consider among the most significant oversights in recent American literary history. In a 2006 New York Times survey of writers, editors, and critics, Underworld was voted the second-best work of American fiction of the past twenty-five years, behind only Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Thomson home run ball real? The ball is real (Thomson hit it on 3 October 1951), but its actual post-game journey is unknown. DeLillo invents a fictional provenance that allows the ball to connect diverse characters across decades — a structural device that gives the novel its picaresque breadth while maintaining a single thread of continuity.
Why does the novel move backward in time? DeLillo said the reverse chronology allows the reader to experience history as archaeology — digging backward toward origins. The novel’s structure mirrors its theme: excavating the buried past beneath the surface of the present. The reader moves from the superficially calm 1990s back toward the raw intensity of the early Cold War, discovering that the apparently stable present is built on layers of buried violence, secrecy, and waste.
Is Underworld DeLillo’s best novel? Most critics say yes, though White Noise has its passionate defenders. Underworld is the more ambitious, the more various, and the more structurally innovative. White Noise is the more perfectly controlled and the more immediately accessible. Together they represent the two modes of DeLillo’s genius: the tight satirical novel and the sprawling historical epic.
How does the prologue relate to the rest of the novel? The prologue establishes every theme the novel will explore: the relationship between public spectacle and hidden reality, the connection between sport and war, the presence of death beneath the surface of American life. It also introduces the baseball, which functions as the novel’s throughline — a physical object that passes from hand to hand, connecting lives that would otherwise remain separate.