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Affiliates
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Works by
Don DeLillo
(Aka Cleo Birdwell)
(Writer)
(November 20, 1936 - ) |
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Profile created
June 29, 2005
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Pafko at the Wall: The Shot Heard Around the World
(2001)
On the fiftieth anniversary of "The Shot
Heard Round the World," Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the
larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby
Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning.
Jackie Gleason is razzing Toots Shor in Leo Durocher's box seats; J.
Edgar Hoover, basking in Sinatra's celebrity, is about to be told that
the Russians have tested an atomic bomb; and Russ Hodges, raw-throated
and excitable, announces the game -- the Giants and the Dodgers at the
Polo Grounds in New York. DeLillo's transcendent account of one of the
iconic events of the twentieth century is a masterpiece of American
sportswriting.
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Point Omega
(2010 release)
From one of our greatest living writers, Don DeLillo, a
brief, unnerving, and hard-hitting new novel about a secret war advisor and a
young filmmaker.
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Falling Man
(2007)
There is September 11 and then there are the days after,
and finally the years.
Falling Man is a magnificent, essential novel about the event that
defines turn-of-the-century America. It begins in the smoke and ash of the
burning towers and tracks the aftermath of this global tremor in the intimate
lives of a few people.
First there is Keith, walking out of the rubble into a life that he'd always
imagined belonged to everyone but him. Then Lianne, his es-tranged wife,
memory-haunted, trying to reconcile two versions of the same shadowy man. And
their small son Justin, standing at the window, scanning the sky for more
planes.
These are lives choreographed by loss, grief and the enormous force of
history.
Brave and brilliant, Falling Man traces the way the events of September
11 have reconfigured our emotional landscape, our memory and our perception of
the world. It is cathartic, beautiful, heartbreaking.
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Cosmopolis
(2003)
It is an April day in the year 2000 and an era is about
to end. The booming times of market optimism -- when the culture boiled with
money and corporations seemed more vital and influential than governments --
are poised to crash. Eric Packer, a billionaire asset manager at age
twenty-eight, emerges from his penthouse triplex and settles into his lavishly
customized white stretch limousine. Today he is a man with two missions: to
pursue a cataclysmic bet against the yen and to get a haircut across town.
Stalled in traffic by a presidential motorcade, a music idol's funeral, and a
violent political demonstration, Eric receives a string of visitors -- experts
on security, technology, currency, finance, and a few sexual partners -- as
the limo sputters toward an increasingly uncertain future.
Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo's thirteenth novel, is both intimate and
global, a vivid and moving account of the spectacular downfall of one man, and
of an era.
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The Body Artist
(2001)
For thirty years, since the publication of his first
novel, Americana, Don DeLillo has lived in the skin of our times. He
has found a voice for the forgotten souls who haunt the fringes of our culture
and for its larger-than-life, real-life figures. His language is defiantly,
radiantly American.
Now, to a new century, he has brought The Body Artist. In this spare,
seductive novel, he inhabits the muted world of Lauren Hartke, an artist whose
work defies the limits of the body. Lauren is living on a lonely coast in a
rambling rented house, where she encounters a strange, ageless man, a man with
uncanny knowledge of her own life. Together they begin a journey into the
wilderness of time -- time, love, and human perception. The Body Artist
is a haunting, beautiful, and profoundly moving novel from one of the finest
writers of our time.
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Underworld
(1997, 2007)
Our lives, our half-century.
Nick Shay and Klara Sax knew each other once, intimately, and they meet again
in the American desert. He is trying to outdistance the crucial events of his
early life, haunted by the hard logic of loss and by the echo of a gunshot in
a basement room. She is an artist who has made a blood struggle for
independence.
Don DeLillo's mesmerizing novel opens with a legendary baseball game played in
New York in 1951. The glorious outcome -- the home run that wins the game is
called the Shot Heard Round the World -- shades into the grim news that the
Soviet Union has just tested an atomic bomb.
The baseball itself, fought over and scuffed, generates the narrative that
follows. It takes the reader deep into the lives of Nick and Klara and into
modern memory and the soul of American culture -- from Bronx tenements to
grand ballrooms to a B-52 bombing raid over Vietnam.
A generation's master spirits come and go. Lenny Bruce cracking desperate
jokes, Mick Jagger with his devil strut, J. Edgar Hoover in a sexy leather
mask. And flashing in the margins of ordinary life are the curiously connected
materials of the culture. Condoms, bombs, Chevy Bel Airs and miracle sites on
the Web.
Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in
deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the
overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every
challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo's greatest and most
powerful work of fiction.
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Mao II
(1991)
Escaping the failed novel he has been working on for
years, reclusive writer Bill Gray enters the world of political violence,
terrorists, revolutionaries, and modern-day chaos.
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Libra
(1988)
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional
speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles
Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious
stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When 'history' presents
itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an
unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation
against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.
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White Noise
(1985)
Jack Gladney, a professor of Nazi history at a Middle
American liberal arts school, and his family try to handle normal family life
as a black cloud of lethal gaseous fumes threatens their town.
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The Names
(1982)
Takes place in the time of the Iranian revolution in
Greece, the Middle East and India. An American risk analyst becomes obsessed
by news of a ritual murder and is drawn to search for clues--a journey that
takes over everything else in his life.
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Running Dog
(1978, 1989)
DeLillo's Running Dog, originally published in
1978, follows Moll Robbins, a New York city journalist trailing the activities
of an influential senator. In the process she is dragged into the black market
world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an
erotic film rumored to "star" Adolph Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering,
and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog
is a bright star in the modern master's early career.
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Players
(197, 1989)
In Players DeLillo explores the dark side of
contemporary affluence and its discontents. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an
attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal"
life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: their talk is mostly
chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory "satisfaction" than
pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and
becomes involved with the terrorists responsible; Pammy leaves for Maine with
a homosexual couple.... And still they remain untouched, "players" indifferent
to the violence that surrounds them, and that they have helped to create.
Originally published in 1977 (before his National Book Award-winning
White
Noise and the recent blockbuster Underworld), Players is a
fast-moving yet starkly drawn socially critical drama that demonstrates the
razor-sharp prose and thematic density for which DeLillo is renown today.
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Ratner's Star
(1976, 1989)
One of DeLillo's first novels,
Ratner's Star follows
Billy, the genius adolescent, who is recruited to live in obscurity,
underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet
lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of
quirky humor, science, mathematical theories, as well as the complex emotional
distance and sadness people feel. Ratner's Star demonstrates both the
thematic and prosaic muscularity that typifies DeLillo's later and more recent
works, like The Names.
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Great Jones Street
(1973, 1994)
The narrator of this novel is Bucky Wunderlick, a Dylan-Jagger
amalgam who finds he's gone as far as he knows how. Mid tour he leaves his
rock band and holes up in a dingy East Village apartment, in Great Jones
Street. The plot revolves around his retreat and a drug designed to silence
dissidents.
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End Zone
(1972, 1986)
In West Texas, college men play football with intense
passion. During a winning season the running back, Gary Harkness, is fuelled
by fear of, and fascination with, nuclear conflict. Among players the
terminologies of football and nuclear war - the language of end zones - become
interchanged.
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Americana
(1971, 1989)
A factional reconstruction of the events leading up to
John Kennedy's assassination. The antihero of the book is, of course, Lee
Harvey Oswald, who is as hauntingly real in this book as he was elusive in
real life.
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Love-Lies-Bleeding
(2006)
Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who
sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave
up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy
now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the
bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman -- his
wife of years past -- who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended.
It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In
this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move
unsteadily toward last things.
Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving,
Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value
of life and how we measure it.
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Valparaiso
(1999)
A man sets out on an ordinary business trip to Valparaiso, Indiana. It turns
out to be a mock-heroic journey toward identity and transcendence.
This is Don DeLillo's second play, and it is funny,
sharp, and deep-reaching. Its characters tend to have needs and desires
shaped by the forces of broadcast technology.
This is the way we talk to each other today. This is the way we tell
each other things, in public, before listening millions, that we don't
dare to say privately.
Nothing is allowed to be unseen. Nothing remains unsaid. And everything
melts repeatedly into something else, as if driven by the finger on the
TV remote.
This is also a play that makes obsessive poetry out of the language of
routine airline announcements and the flow of endless information.
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The Day Room
(1986, 1998)
Don DeLillo's first play, is a black comedy that
explores the chaos caused when the onlooker is unsure of the status of a team
of medics in a psychiatric unit. Are they really bona fide staff or patients
just pretending to be?
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Conversations with Don DeLillo
(2005)
by Thomas DePietro
In novel after award-winning novel, Don DeLillo
(b. 1936) exhibits his deep distrust of language and the way it can
conceal as much as it reveals. Not surprisingly, DeLillo treats
interviews with the same care and caution. For years, he shunned them
altogether. As his fiction grew in popularity, especially with "White
Noise," and he began to confront the historical record of our times in
books such as "Libra," DeLillo felt compelled to make himself
available to his readers. Despite claims by interviewers about his
elusiveness, he now hides in plain sight.
In "Conversations with Don DeLillo," the renowned author makes clear
his distinctions between historical fact and his own creative leaps,
especially in his masterwork, "Underworld." There it seems the true
events are unbelievable and imaginary ones not. Throughout long
profiles and conversations -- ranging from 1982 to 2001 and published
in the "New Yorker," the "Paris Review," and "Rolling Stone" --
DeLillo parries personal inquiries. He counters with the details of
his work habits, his understanding of the novelist's role in the
world, and his sense of our media-saturated culture. A number of
interviews detail DeLillo's less-heralded work in the theater, from
"The Day Room" to a recent production of "Valparaiso," itself a
stinging satire on the interviewing process.
DeLillo also finds time to comment on his nonliterary passions,
primarily the movies and baseball. Lee Harvey Oswald also inspires
much extraliterary discussion, not just as the subject of "Libra," but
as a figure who, like the terrorists always lurking in DeLillo's
fictions, captures our attention in ways novelists cannot. For DeLillo,
a writer who eschews celebrity, the ultimate response might be the one
he offered in his very first interview, paraphrasing Joyce: "Silence,
exile, cunning, and so on. It's my nature to keep quiet about most
things." Fortunately for his many readers and fans, he proves himself
here to be a talker.
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White Noise: Text and Criticism
(1998)
by Don DeLillo and Mark Osteen
Winner of the National Book Award in 1985, White
Noise is the story of Jack and Babette and their children from their
six or so various marriages. They live in a college town where Jack is
Professor of Hitler Studies (and conceals the fact that he does not
speak a word of German), and Babette teaches posture and volunteers by
reading from the tabloids to a group of elderly shut-ins. They are
happy enough until a deadly toxic accident and Babette's addiction to
an experimental drug make Jake question everything. White Noise is
considered a postmodern classic and its unfolding of themes of
consumerism, family and divorce, and technology as a deadly threat
have attracted the attention of literary scholars since its
publication. This Viking Critical Library edition, prepared by scholar
Mark Osteen, is the only edition of White Noise that contains the
entire text along with an extensive critical apparatus, including a
critical introduction, selected essays on the author, the work and its
themes, reviews, a chronology of DeLillo's life and work, a list of
discussion topics, and a selected bibliography.
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