American · b. 1936
National Book Award (1985), PEN/Faulkner Award, Jerusalem Prize
Don DeLillo is an American novelist whose White Noise and other works examine consumerism, fear, and American cultural anxiety through dense, darkly comic literary prose.
Don DeLillo has been a central figure in American postmodern fiction since the 1970s, and White Noise, published in 1985, remains his most widely read and taught work. Set in a midwestern college town, it follows Jack Gladney — professor of Hitler Studies, a field he invented — through the banalities of domestic life, a chemical disaster he calls the “Airborne Toxic Event,” and a sustained meditation on the fear of death that underlies American consumer culture. The novel is simultaneously comic and disturbing, a portrait of a society using media, shopping, and information overload as analgesics against existential dread.
DeLillo’s prose is distinctive — formally precise, rhythmically controlled, with dialogue that sounds like no one actually speaks but illuminates how people think. He is not a writer of emotional warmth, and White Noise is not a comfortable book. Its satirical targets — television, academia, pharmaceutical culture, the commodification of everything — are rendered with enough affection to avoid simple polemic, and the characters have a recognizable humanity beneath the conceptual surface.
Some readers find DeLillo cold and difficult; his reputation as a Great American Novelist can intimidate readers expecting conventional pleasures. White Noise is a better entry point than his larger, more demanding novels like Underworld. It benefits from a recent Netflix adaptation that brought new attention to the book and from an ongoing relevance — its portrait of a culture overwhelmed by information and terrified of mortality has aged into something closer to prophecy than satire.
by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's masterwork begins with a legendary 1951 baseball game between the Giants and the Dodgers — the 'shot heard round the world' — and traces the fate of the ball hit for the home run through fifty years of American history: the Cold War, nuclear anxiety, the waste stream, art, crime, and the interconnected lives of ordinary Americans. It is the great American novel of the second half of the twentieth century.
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by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's fictional account of Lee Harvey Oswald — the conspiracy theorists who recruited him, the forces that shaped him, and the day in Dallas — is the most formally rigorous of the many Kennedy assassination novels. DeLillo is not interested in whether Oswald did it but in what kind of person could be shaped into such an act: a man made entirely of images, ideologies, and other people's narratives.
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by Don DeLillo
James Axton, a risk analyst working in Athens in the early 1980s, becomes entangled with a cult that commits murders based on alphabetical correspondences between victims' initials and the place-names where they are killed. DeLillo's most purely thriller-shaped novel is also his most explicit meditation on language: the cult's strange grammar of death is the extreme version of the novel's central question — what is the relationship between words and the world?
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by Don DeLillo
Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist who has not published in decades, is drawn into a situation involving a poet held hostage by a terrorist group in Beirut. DeLillo's meditation on the relationship between writers and terrorists — both of whom claim the power to change how people see the world — is his most concentrated statement of his themes: the crowd, the image, the person who withdraws from visibility and the person who seeks it at any cost.
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by Don DeLillo
DeLillo's 9/11 novel follows Keith Neudecker, who walks away from the World Trade Center on the morning of the attacks carrying a stranger's briefcase, and the weeks afterward as he and his wife Lianne try to rebuild — and the performance artist who falls from buildings in a harness, recreating the image of the falling man. DeLillo writes around the event rather than depicting it, which is the only honest formal strategy for something that defeated language.
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by Don DeLillo
Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler Studies at a Midwestern college, faces a toxic chemical disaster and an existential terror of death. DeLillo's National Book Award winner and a defining postmodern American novel.
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by Don DeLillo
Eric Packer, a 28-year-old billionaire currency trader, crosses midtown Manhattan in his stretch limousine on a day when his bet against the yen is going catastrophically wrong, the city is gridlocked by a presidential motorcade, and someone — possibly himself — is trying to kill him.
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by Don DeLillo
Jeffrey Lockhart is summoned to a remote facility in central Asia where the ultra-wealthy can cryonically preserve their bodies until medicine can cure what ails them. His father has paid for Jeffrey's stepmother to be preserved as she dies of multiple sclerosis. The novel meditates on death, technology, and the human refusal to accept mortality.
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Don DeLillo's complete bibliography in order — from White Noise and Underworld to Libra and Falling Man. Best starting points and reading order for this postmodern American master.
guide
Where to start with Don DeLillo — whether to begin with White Noise, Underworld, or Libra. A complete reading guide to DeLillo's major novels.
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