Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo is an American novelist widely regarded as one of the essential voices in American literature for his incisive, prescient accounts of modern life, media, consumerism, and the forces of history. Born in the Bronx, New York, in 1936, DeLillo studied at Fordham University and began his career writing for magazines before publishing his debut novel Americana (1971). DeLillo's major novels include White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award and is one of the definitive American novels of postmodernity; Libra (1988), a fictional account of Lee Harvey Oswald; Mao II (1991); Underworld (1997), a sprawling masterwork about the Cold War and American history; Falling Man (2007); and Point Omega (2010). He received the National Book Foundation's Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2015, the Jerusalem Prize, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the William Dean Howells Medal. DeLillo's prose is famous for its formal precision, its dark wit, and its capacity to capture the peculiar textures of American anxiety and mass culture. He is considered one of the great American literary novelists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.