Don DeLillo

Biography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_DeLillo

Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, mathematics, politics, economics, and baseball.

DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet.[1][2] He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.[3]

DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture".[4] In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."[5]

Themes and criticism

DeLillo's work displays elements of both modernism and postmodernism.[68][69] (Though it is worth noting that DeLillo himself claims not to know if his work is postmodern: "It is not [postmodern]. I'm the last guy to ask. If I had to classify myself, it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.")[70] He has said the primary influences on his work and development are "abstract expressionism, foreign films, and jazz."[71] 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. Elsewhere, when asked about being labeled postmodern, DeLillo said: "I don't react. But I'd prefer not to be labeled. I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist."[72]

A fictionalized DeLillo blogs for The Onion.[81]

In reviews

David Foster Wallace saluted DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, and Cormac McCarthy as three of the greatest living fiction authors in the United States.[86]

DeLillo lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville with his wife, Barbara Bennett.[13]

Origins

The son of an Italian immigrant who arrived in the US in 1915 and worked for an insurance company in New York, DeLillo had a traditional Catholic childhood in the Bronx. He played baseball in the streets -a passion reflected on in later work-and attended Cardinal Hayes High School before going on to local Fordham University. 'The Jesuits taught me to be a failed ascetic,' he later said.

Source: Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "Bronx: 182nd Street - Adams Place" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 6, 2024. < link >

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“I’ll show you the old house,” he said, and he headed to the corner of 182nd Street and Adams Place. The house is a narrow, three-story place with patchy asbestos shingles. DeLillo grew up here with his parents, both immigrants from Italy, his sister, his aunt and uncle, and their three kids. An old man was sitting on the front steps. He had a broad belly that stretched and belled out the t-shirt he was wearing. It read, “You Idiot, Your Fly Is Open.” Shy and friendly, DeLillo said hello and said he’d lived here many years ago.

“You wanna again?” the old man said, with a thick southern-Italian accent. “I sell you a hunnert twenny-five thousand.”

DeLillo smiled and said, “See this brick gate? My father built that!”

“A hunnert twenny-five thousand,” the man replied.

We were by now sweating, parboiled, but there was nothing much open. Finally, DeLillo found a pastry and coffee shop that featured working air-conditioning. After we sat down, I asked him why he’d waited until he had filled a substantial shelf with novels before turning to the Bronx in his fiction. In “Underworld,” Nick Shay grows up in an apartment building near DeLillo’s old house.

DeLillo went to Cardinal Hayes High School (“where I slept”) and to Fordham University (“where I majored in something called ‘communication arts’ ”). His father worked as a payroll clerk at Metropolitan Life, in Manhattan.

DeLillo, like any New Yorker, talks about neighborhood in narrow terms. When we passed Bathgate Avenue, he pointed out the street sign and said, “I keep out of there. That’s Doctorow’s turf.”

Source: Profiles: Exile on Main Street. Don DeLillo’s undisclosed underworld. By David Remnick September 7, 1997. < link >

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Source: The Observer, May 4, 2003, Page 27. via Newspapers.com (https://www.newspapers.com/article/the-observer-don-delillo/146692795/ : accessed May 5, 2024), clip page for Don DeLillo

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References

1. 1940 United States Federal Census < MyHeritage >
2. 1950 United States Federal Census < AncestryImage >
3. Don DeLillo: A Preliminary Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center < link > Index of correspondents
   1. Delillo, Agnes and Margaret--110.7
   2. DeLillo, Carmel--111.3
   3. De Lillo, Diane--118.3, 119.3, 120.2
   4. DeLillo, Don--109.4
   5. DeLillo, Don (Deldon Investments, Inc.)--109.4
   6. DeLillo, Marianna and Bob--120.3, 120.6
   7. DeLillo, Victor--112.7
   8. DeLillo-Morgan, Teresa L.--110.4
4. Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library. "Bronx telephone directory" New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed May 6, 2024. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/f38b4f90-97cc-0135-4973-6... (not listed)
5. The following data came from NARA T1224 Film Series augmented with additional institution and community names by the One-Step project https://stevemorse.org/ed/ed2.php?year=1950&fromEdFinder=yes&state=... Year Series Roll State County ED Description Details 1950 T628 NY Bronx (3) 3-992 BRONX BOROUGH, NEW YORK CITY (TRACT 391) BOUNDED BY (N) 183RD E; (E) HUGHES AVE; (S) 182ND E; (W) ARTHUR AVE view