End Zone

End Zone

First edition cover
Author Don DeLillo
Country United States
Language English
Genre Novel
Publisher Houghton Mifflin
Publication date
March, 1972
Media type Print (Hardback)
Pages 242 (hardback first edition)
ISBN 0-395-13645-8
OCLC 309479
813/.5/4
LC Class PZ4.D346 En PS3554.E4425

End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972.[1]

It is a light-hearted farce that foreshadows much of his later, more mature work. Set at small Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is narrated in first person by Gary Harkness, a blocking back on the American football team during the school's first integrated year.

Plot Summary

Cover of the UK first edition.

Gary spends time playing football, picnicking with a girl named Myna, and contemplating nuclear warfare. Its meditative but ultimately playful nature, spry dialogue, and deep but mostly unconnected themes make End Zone perhaps the most easily accessible of DeLillo's early works.

The metaphor of football as warfare is challenged in the line "warfare is warfare."

Film Adaptation

In 2007, Joshua director George Ratliff started pre-production on a feature film adaptation of End Zone. Josh Hartnett has been announced in the role of Gary.[2]

As of 2010, the film appeared to be dead.

References

  1. Duvall, John N. (2008), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, Cambridge University Press, pp. x & 55–60, ISBN 1139828088.
  2. Hartnett runs to "End Zone"