24 Facts About Don DeLillo

Donald Richard DeLillo was born on November 20,1936 and is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist.

Don DeLillo's works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, mathematics, politics, economics, and baseball.

Don DeLillo followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination.

Don DeLillo was born on November 20,1936, in New York City and grew up in a Italian Catholic family with ties to Molise, Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx not far from Arthur Avenue.

In 1978, Don DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Greece, where he wrote his next novels, Amazons and The Names.

Also in 1982, Don DeLillo finally broke his self-imposed ban on media coverage by giving his first major interview to Tom LeClair, who had first tracked Don DeLillo down for an interview while he was in Greece in 1979.

White Noise was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for Don DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award for Fiction and a place in the canon of contemporary postmodern novelists.

Don DeLillo remained as detached as ever from his growing reputation: when called upon to give an acceptance speech for the award, he simply said, "I'm sorry I couldn't be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming," and then sat down.

The novel elicited fierce critical division, with some critics praising Don DeLillo's take on the Kennedy assassination while others decried it.

Don DeLillo took inspiration from the October 4,1951, front page of The New York Times, which juxtaposed Thomson's home-run alongside the news that the Soviet Union had tested a hydrogen bomb.

Underworld went on to become Don DeLillo's most acclaimed novel to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book Award and the New York Times Best Books of the Year in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998.

Don DeLillo followed The Body Artist with 2003's Cosmopolis, a modern reinterpretation of James Joyce's Ulysses transposed to New York around the time of the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000.

Don DeLillo's papers were acquired in 2004 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, reputedly for "half a million dollars".

Don DeLillo published his final novel of the decade, Falling Man, in 2007.

Don DeLillo ended the decade by making an unexpected appearance at a PEN event on the steps of the New York City Public Library in support of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" on December 31,2009.

Don DeLillo published Point Omega, his 15th novel, in February 2010.

Don DeLillo made some observations on the state of literature and the challenges facing young writers:.

Don DeLillo received the 2012 Carl Sandburg Literary Award on October 17,2012, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Don DeLillo is driven by love for his wife, for Artis, without whom he feels life is not worth living.

In November 2015, Don DeLillo received the 2015 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 66th National Book Awards Ceremony.

The first Library of America volume of Don DeLillo's writings was published in October 2022.

Don DeLillo is one of a handful of authors so anthologized while alive; others include Eudora Welty, Philip Roth and Ursula K Le Guin.

Since 1979, in addition to his novels and occasional essays, Don DeLillo has been active as a playwright.

Critics of Don DeLillo argue that his novels are overly stylized and intellectually shallow.