Don DeLillo

Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist whose work has profoundly shaped late 20th— and early 21st-century fiction. Over a career spanning more than five decades, DeLillo has become one of the central figures of American postmodern literature, known for his incisive portrayals of consumer culture, mass media, political violence, and the existential anxieties of contemporary life.

Don DeLillo began writing fiction in the 1960s after a stint as an advertising copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather. His first novel, Americana (1971), introduced many of his enduring themes—media saturation, identity, and the search for meaning in modern America. In the 1970s, he produced experimental works such as End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), and Ratner's Star (1976), which confirmed his reputation as a sharp observer of American absurdity and intellectual ambition.

His major critical breakthrough came with White Noise (1985), a darkly comic exploration of academia, death, and information overload that won the National Book Award and secured his place in the American literary canon. The novel’s prescient treatment of technology and media remains one of the most widely studied works of contemporary fiction.

DeLillo followed with Libra (1988), a speculative reimagining of the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination. Blending historical fact and fiction, Libra was shortlisted for the National Book Award and demonstrated DeLillo’s mastery of the political novel. His next work, Mao II (1991), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, examined the uneasy relationship between writers, terrorists, and the media, articulating his belief that “the novelist helps us see what’s hidden in plain sight.”

In 1997, Don DeLillo published his magnum opus, Underworld, an epic chronicle of postwar America that interweaves Cold War politics, baseball, and nuclear anxiety. The novel won the American Book Award and the William Dean Howells Medal and is often cited as one of the greatest American novels of the 20th century.

Later works, including The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007), Point Omega (2010), and Zero K (2016), mark a stylistic shift toward minimalism and metaphysical reflection, focusing on time, mortality, and the human body in a digitised world.

DeLillo’s influence extends across generations of writers, including David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Zadie Smith. His numerous honours include the Jerusalem Prize (1999), the PEN/Saul Bellow Award (2010), and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2013).