Don DeLillo
1 book analyzed
Biography
Don DeLillo (born 1936 in the Bronx, New York) grew up in an Italian-American working-class neighborhood and studied at Fordham University. He worked in advertising before becoming a novelist — an experience that saturated his sensibility with the language of mass persuasion. White Noise, his eighth novel, was published in 1985 and won the National Book Award, transforming him from a cult figure into a major American writer. He spent years researching for the novel at a supermarket in New York, taking notes on the arrangement of products, the behavior of shoppers, the acoustic quality of the space. He has described the novel as coming out of his sense that Americans had replaced genuine experience with media simulation — a feeling that intensified with the assassination of JFK and the Vietnam War's arrival via television into American living rooms.