| Don DeLillo | |
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| Born | November 20, 1936 New York City |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Nationality | United States |
| Literary movement | Postmodern |
| Notable work(s) | White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man |
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Influences
Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, William Gaddis, Malcolm Lowry, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, John Dos Passos, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, Flannery O'Connor
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Influenced
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Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. DeLillo's novels have tackled subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. He currently lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville.[1]
Contents |
DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, not far from Arthur Avenue.[2] Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo later described how he was "...always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English."[3] The child of Italian immigrants from the village of Montagano (Campobasso), he attended Fordham University in the Bronx, from which he received a bachelor's degree in Communication Arts upon his graduation in 1958.[2]
As a teenager, DeLillo wasn't interested in writing until taking a summer job as a parking attendant, where hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a reading habit: in a 2010 interview with The Australian, DeLillo reflected on this period by saying "I had a personal golden age of reading, in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time".[4] Among the writers DeLillo read and was inspired by in this period were James Joyce, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Ernest Hemingway, who was a major influence on DeLillo's earliest attempts at writing in his late teens.[5]
After graduating from Fordham, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he couldn't get one in publishing. He worked for five years as a copywriter at the agency of Ogilvy & Mather on Fifth Avenue at East 48th Street,[6] writing image ads for Sears Roebuck among others, working on “Print ads, very undistinguished accounts...I hadn’t made the leap to television. I was just getting good at it when I left,"[7] before he quit in 1964. DeLillo published his first short story, "The River Jordan", in Epoch, the literary magazine of Cornell University, in 1960 and began to work on his first novel in 1966. Discussing the beginning of his writing career, DeLillo said, "I did some short stories at that time, but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore."[8]
DeLillo's inaugural decade of novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing and publication of six novels in eight years between 1971-1978.[4]
After he quit the advertising industry in 1964, DeLillo began to write his first novel. He later reflected: "...I lived in a very minimal kind of way. My telephone would be $4.30 every month. I was paying a rent of sixty dollars a month. And I was becoming a writer. So in one sense, I was ignoring the movements of the time."[9] DeLillo's first novel, Americana, was written over the course of four years[2] and finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. Americana concerned "a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture".[2] This novel was later revised by DeLillo in 1989 for paperback re-printing. Reflecting on the novel later in his career, DeLillo admitted "I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published."[10]
Americana was followed in rapid succession by the American college football/nuclear war black comedy End Zone (1972) and the rock and roll satire Great Jones Street (1973), which DeLillo later felt was "...one of the books I wish I’d done differently. It should be tighter, and probably a little funnier."[11] In 1975, he married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned landscape designer.
DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976), took four years to write and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon. This "conceptual monster", as DeLillo scholar Tom LeClair describes it, is "the picaresque story of a 14-year-old math genius who joins an international consortium of mad scientists decoding an alien message."[12] and has been cited by DeLillo as both one of the most difficult books to write[13] and his personal favourite of his own novels.
Following this early attempt at a major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. Players (1977) concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as they get involved with a cell of domestic terrorists, and Running Dog (1978), written in a brief four month streak[14], was a thriller concerning numerous individuals hunting down a celluloid reel of Adolf Hitler's sexual exploits.
In 1979, DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Greece.[4]
Reflecting on his first six novels and his rapid writing turnover later in his career, DeLillo remarked, "I wasn't learning to slow down and examine what I was doing more closely. I don't have regrets about that work, but I do think that if I had been a bit less hasty in starting each new book, I might have produced somewhat better work in the 1970s. My first novel took so long and was such an effort that once I was free of it I almost became carefree in a sense and moved right through the decade, stopping, in a way, only at Ratner's Star (1976), which was an enormous challenge for me, and probably a bigger challenge for the reader. But I slowed down in the 1980s and 90s."[4] DeLillo has also acknowledged some of the weaknesses of his 1970's works, reflecting in 2007: "I knew I wasn’t doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way."[15]
The beginning of the 1980s saw the most unusual and uncharacteristic publication in DeLillo's career. The sports novel Amazons, a mock memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, is a far more light hearted and more evidently commercial novel than his previous and subsequent novels. DeLillo published the novel under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and later requested publishers compiling a bibliography for a reprint of a later novel to expunge the novel from their lists.
While DeLillo spent several years living in Greece,[16] he took three years[13] to write The Names (1982), a complex thriller concerning "a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East".[2] While lauded by an increasing number of literary critics, DeLillo was still relatively unknown outside of small academic circles and did not reach a wide readership with this novel. Also in 1982, DeLillo finally broke his self-imposed ban on media coverage by giving his first major interview to Tom LeClair,[17] who had first tracked DeLillo down for an interview while he was in Greece in 1979 (on that occasion, DeLillo had handed LeClair a business card with his name printed on it and beneath that the message "I don't want to talk about it.")[17]
With the publication of his eighth novel White Noise in 1985, DeLillo began a rapid ascendancy to being a noted and respected novelist. White Noise was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award[2] and a place among the academic canon of contemporary postmodern novelists. DeLillo remained as detached as ever from his growing reputation: when called upon to give an acceptance speech for the Award, he simply said, "I'm sorry I couldn't be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming," and then sat down.[1][18] The influence and impact of White Noise can be seen in the writing of such authors as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of the novel).[16]
DeLillo followed White Noise with Libra (1988), a speculative fictionalised take on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald up to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. Originally written with the working title of either "American Blood" or "Texas School Book," Libra became an international bestseller,[2] earned DeLillo another nomination for the National Book Award, and won the Irish Times Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize the following year. The novel also elicited fierce critical division, with some critics praising DeLillo's take on the Kennedy assassination while others decried it. George Will, in a Washington Post article,[19] declared the book to be an affront to America and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship."[19]
DeLillo's concerns about the position of the novelist and the novel in a media- and terrorist-dominated society were made clear in his next novel, Mao II (1991). Clearly influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed upon the author Salman Rushdie and the intrusion of the press into the life of the reclusive writer JD Salinger,[2] Mao II earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, fellow authors John Banville and Thomas Pynchon. He earned a PEN/Faulkner Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist nomination for Mao II in 1991 and 1992, respectively.
Following Mao II, DeLillo went to ground and spent several years writing and researching his eleventh novel. Aside from the publication of a folio short story entitled 'Pafko at the Wall' in a 1992 edition of Harpers Magazine, and one short story in 1995, little was seen or heard of him for a number of years.
In 1997, DeLillo finally broke cover with his long awaited eleventh novel, the epic Cold War history Underworld. The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic Martin Amis saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer."[20] Underworld went on to become DeLillo's most acclaimed novel to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book Award,[21] the New York Times Best Books of the Year award in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998. The novel went on to win the 1998 American Book Award, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, and both the William Dean Howells Medal and "Riccardo Bacchelli" International Award in 2000. It was a runner-up in The New York Times' survey of the best American fiction of the last 25 years (announced in May, 2006). White Noise and Libra were also recognized by the anonymous jury of contemporary writers.
DeLillo has subsequently expressed surprise at the success of the novel. In 2007, he candidly remarked: "When I finished with Underworld, I didn't really have any all-too-great hopes, to be honest. It's some pretty complicated stuff: 800 pages, more than 100 different characters -- who's going to be interested in that?"[22] Reflecting on the writing of Underworld in 2010 over ten years after its publication, DeLillo said in an interview with that re-reading the novel "...made me wonder whether I would be capable of that kind of writing now — the range and scope of it. There are certain parts of the book where the exuberance, the extravagance, I don’t know, the overindulgence... There are city scenes in New York that seem to transcend reality in a certain way.”[6]
Although they have received some acclaim in places, DeLillo's post-Underworld novels have been often viewed by critics as "...disappointing and slight, especially when held up against his earlier, big-canvas epics",[18] marking a shift "...away from sweeping, era-defining novels such as "White Noise," "Libra" and "Underworld." to a more "spare and oblique"[18] style. DeLillo has commented on this shift to shorter novels, saying "“If a longer novel announces itself, I’ll write it. A novel creates its own structure and develops its own terms. I tend to follow. And I never try to stretch what I sense is a compact book.”[1] In a March 2010 interview, it was reported that DeLillo's deliberate stylistic shift had been informed by his having recently re-read several slim but seminal European novels, including Albert Camus's The Stranger, Peter Handke's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, and Max Frisch's Man in the Holocene.[4]
After the publication and extensive publicity drive for Underworld, DeLillo once again retreated from the spotlight to write his twelfth novel, surfacing with The Body Artist in 2001. The slight and brief novella was very different in style and tone to the epic history of Underworld, and met with a mixed critical reception.
DeLillo followed The Body Artist with 2003's Cosmopolis, a modern re-interpretation of James Joyce's Ulysses transposed to New York around the time of the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the year 2000. This novel was met at the time with a largely negative reception, with several high profile critics and novelists-notably John Updike-voicing their objections to the novel's style and tone. However, subsequently critical opinions have been revised and it is often seen in a much better light, and prescient for its views on the flaws and weaknesses of the international financial system and cybercapital.
DeLillo's papers were acquired in 2004 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.[23]
DeLillo returned with what would turn out to be his final novel of the decade with Falling Man in May, 2007. The novel concerned the impact on one family of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, "...an intimate story which is encompassed by a global event."[24] According to a 2007 interview in Dei Zeit, DeLillo claims that originally he "...didn't ever want to write a novel about 9/11." and "...had an idea for a different book" which he had "been working on for half a year" in 2004 when he came up with an idea for the novel, beginning work on the novel following the re-election of George W. Bush that November.[25] Although highly anticipated and eagerly awaited by critics, who felt that DeLillo was one of the contemporary writers best equipped to tackle with the events of 9/11 in novelistic form, the novel met once again with a mixed critical reception and garnered no major literary awards. DeLillo, however, remains unconcerned by this relative lack of critical acclaim, remarking in 2010 "In the 1970s, when I started writing novels, I was a figure in the margins, and that’s where I belonged. If I’m headed back that way, that’s fine with me, because that’s always where I felt I belonged. Things changed for me in the 1980s and 1990s, but I’ve always preferred to be somewhere in the corner of a room, observing.”[6]
On April 25, 2009 DeLillo received another significant literary award, the 2009 Common Wealth Award for Literature, given by PNC Bank of Delaware.[26]
On June 9, 2009 it was announced that DeLillo's next novel, his fifteenth, had been completed and was set for publication. Titled Point Omega, the brief plot description released revealed that the new short novel concerns: "A young filmmaker [who] visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man's daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn." The first confirmed extract from Point Omega was made available on the Simon and Schuster website on December 10, 2009.[27]
On July 24, 2009, Entertainment Weekly announced:
Director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence, Naked Lunch) will write a screenplay adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2003 novel Cosmopolis, with "a view to eventually direct,"[28]
This would be the first direct adaptation for the screen of a DeLillo novel, although both Libra and Underworld have previously been optioned for screen treatments and DeLillo himself has written an original screenplay for the film Game 6. On January 13, 2010, The Canadian Press revealed the latest update on the adaptation:[29]
Cronenberg...said he's finished writing the big-screen adaptation of Don DeLillo's provocative 2003 novel "Cosmopolis." "Everyone's happy with the script," he said, noting they haven't cast it yet. "It's a project I'm very fond of," added Cronenberg. "It's a terrific book and plans are in the works to make that movie.[29]
On November 30, 2009, DeLillo published a new original short story in the New Yorker magazine, his first since "Still Life" in 2007 prior to the release of Falling Man. The new story is called "Midnight in Doestoevsky" and it is a standalone short story (not a part of DeLillo's forthcoming novel Point Omega as seen in the advance copies).[30]
DeLillo ended the decade by making an unexpected appearance at a PEN event on the steps of the New York City Public Library, 5th Ave and 42nd St in support of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to eleven years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" on December 31, 2009.[31]
DeLillo published Point Omega as his fifteenth novel under his own name in February of 2010. According to DeLillo, the novel considers an idea from "...the writing of the Jesuit thinker and paleontologist [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin."[10] The 'Omega Point' of the title "...[is] the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable."[10] Reviews thus far have been incredibly polarised, with some saying the novel is a return to form and innovative, while others have complained about the novel's brevity and apparent lack of plot and engaging characters. Upon its initial release, Point Omega spent one week on the New York Times Bestseller List, peaking at #35 on the extended version of the list during its one week stay on the list.[32]
In a January 29, 2010 interview with the Wall Street Journal, DeLillo discussed Point Omega, his views of writing and his plans for the future at great length. When asked about why his recent novels had been shorter, DeLillo replied, "Each book tells me what it wants or what it is, and I'd be perfectly content to write another long novel. It just has to happen."[10] While DeLillo is open to the idea of returning to the form of the long novel, the interview also revealed that he currently has no interest in doing as many of his literary contemporaries have done and writing a memoir.[10] DeLillo also made some observations on the state of literature and the challenges facing young writers:
"It's tougher to be a young writer today than when I was a young writer. I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published. I don't think publishers have that kind of tolerance these days, and I guess possibly as a result, more writers go to writing class now than then. I think first, fiction, and second, novels, are much more refined in terms of language, but they may tend to be too well behaved, almost in response to the narrower market."[10]
However, in a February 21, 2010 interview with The Times newspaper, DeLillo re-affirmed his belief in the validity and importance of the novel in a technology and media driven age, offering a more optimistic opinion of the future of the novel than his contemporary Philip Roth had done in a recent interview:
“It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can’t be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it’s true.”[1]
Since 1979, in addition to his novels and occasional essays, DeLillo has been active as a playwright. To date, DeLillo has written five major plays: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (1986), Valparaiso (1999), Love Lies Bleeding (2006), and, most recently, The Word For Snow (2007). Stage adaptations have also been written for DeLillo's novel's Libra and Mao II.
DeLillo is widely considered by modern critics to be one of the central figures of literary postmodernism. He has said the primary influences on his work and development are "abstract expressionism, foreign films, and jazz."[33] Many of DeLillo's books (notably White Noise) satirize academia and explore postmodern themes of rampant consumerism, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence. In several of his novels, DeLillo explores the idea of the increasing visibility and effectiveness of terrorists as societal actors and, consequently, the displacement of what he views to be artists', and particularly novelists', traditional role in facilitating social discourse (Players, Mao II, Falling Man). Another perpetual theme in DeLillo's books is the saturation of mass media and its role in forming simulacra which serve to remove an event from its context and alter or drain its inherent meaning (see the highway shooter in Underworld, the televised disasters longed for in White Noise, the planes in Falling Man, the evolving story of the interviewee in Valparaiso). The psychology of crowds and the capitulation of individuals to group identity is a theme DeLillo examines in several of his novels, especially in the prologue to Underworld, Mao II, and Falling Man. In a 1993 interview with Maria Nadotti, DeLillo explained
| “ | My book (Mao II), in a way, is asking who is speaking to these people. Is it the writer who traditionally thought he could influence the imagination of his contemporaries or is it the totalitarian leader, the military man, the terrorist, those who are twisted by power and who seem capable of imposing their vision on the world, reducing the earth to a place of danger and anger. Things have changed a lot in recent years. One doesn't step onto an airplane in the same spirit as one did ten years ago: it's all different and this change has insinuated itself into our consciousness with the same force with which it insinuated itself into the visions of Beckett or Kafka.[34] | ” |
Many younger English-language authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace have cited DeLillo as an influence. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time,[35] along with Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy, though he questions the classification of DeLillo as a "postmodern novelist." Asked if he approves of this designation, DeLillo has responded: "I don't react. But I'd prefer not to be labeled. I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist."[36]
Critics of DeLillo allege that his novels are overly stylized and intellectually shallow. Bruce Bawer famously condemned DeLillo's novels insisting they weren't actually novels at all but "tracts, designed to batter us, again and again, with a single idea: that life in America today is boring, benumbing, dehumanized...It's better, DeLillo seems to say in one novel after another, to be a marauding murderous maniac—and therefore a human—than to sit still for America as it is, with its air conditioners, assembly lines, television sets, supermarkets, synthetic fabrics, and credit cards."[37] George Will proclaimed the study of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra as "sandbox existentialism" and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship."[37] DeLillo responded "I don't take it seriously, but being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job."[37] DeLillo also figured prominently in B. R. Myers' critique of recent American literary fiction, A Reader's Manifesto.
Game 6, the story of a playwright (played by Michael Keaton) and his obsession with the Boston Red Sox and the 1986 World Series, was written in the early 90s, but wasn't produced until 2005, ironically one year after the Red Sox won their first World Series title in 86 years. To date, it is DeLillo's only work for film.
8. Jacobs, Timothy. “Don DeLillo.” Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia. Ed. Peter Knight. Oxford: ABC-CLIO Press, 2003. 219-220.