DeLillo, Don (dəlĭl`ō), 1936–, American novelist, b. New York City, grad. Fordham Univ. (1958). DeLillo is an accomplished prose stylist with a dark vision and mordant wit. In a steady stream of novels beginning with Americana (1971), he has explored the anomie and violence of contemporary America—rock music and drugs in Great Jones Street (1973), science and mathematics in Ratner's Star (1976), terrorism in Players (1977), spying in Running Dog (1978), and political corruption in The Names (1982). His White Noise (1985), the story of Hitler studies professor Jack Gladney and a meditation on the fear of death, was followed by Libra (1988), a fictional portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald Oswald, Lee Harvey, 1939–63, presumed assassin of John F. Kennedy, b. New Orleans. Oswald spent most of his boyhood in Fort Worth, Tex. Later, he attended a Dallas high school, and enlisted (1956) in the Marines and served until 1959.
..... Click the link for more information. and Mao II (1991), about CIA activities in Greece. DeLillo's longest, most complicated, and most highly praised novel is Underworld (1997). In its sweep of time from 1951 to 1992, its panorama of American characters and landscapes, and its uniquely descriptive language, it portrays the vastness and variety of the ways Americans lived in the mid- to late 20th cent. This brilliant behemoth was followed by two relatively minor works—The Body Artist (2001), a dark and brief quasi–ghost story, and Cosmopolis (2003), a satire focused on a Manhattan billionaire. DeLillo is also a playwright.

DeLillo, Don

(born Nov. 20, 1936, New York, N.Y., U.S.) U.S. novelist. Born to immigrant parents, DeLillo worked in advertising before beginning to write seriously. His postmodernist works portray the unrest and alienation of an America cosseted by material excess and stupefied by empty mass culture and politics. Ratner's Star (1976) attracted attention with its baroque comic sense and verbal facility. His vision later turned darker and his characters more willful in their destructiveness and ignorance, as in Players (1977) and White Noise (1985). Libra (1988) portrays Lee Harvey Oswald, Underworld (1997) surveys American society after 1950, and Falling Man (2007) examines the September 11 attacks of 2001.

DeLillo, Don (1936–; ) writer; born in New York City. He was briefly a New York advertising copywriter before becoming a professional fiction writer. Starting with his first novel, Americana (1971), his social satires are known for their precise language and pervasive sense of anomie and have earned him a reputation as a writer's writer. His books included Ratner's Star (1976), White Noise (1985, American Book Award), and Libra (1988).