19 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present

Bruce Weber, “On Literary Bridge, Poet Hits a Roadblock,” New York Times,
19 December 1999 http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/19/us/on-literary-
bridge-poet-hits-a-roadblock.html?pagewanted=1 [accessed 26 February
2010].
Recounts the controversy surrounding the publication of Sailing Alone around
the Room, offers a sample of Collins’s work and an overview of his career, and
describes him as “the most popular poet in America.”

—Linda Trinh Moser

h

Don DeLillo, White Noise

(New York: Viking, 1985)

Don DeLillo is often one of the first names mentioned when discussions turn
to literary Postmodernism. Critics debate many different definitions of Post-
modernism, yet what they all share is a concern with how language and other
forms of representation shape us and separate us from reality. Although it is
far too simplistic to say that DeLillo belongs to any one camp of Postmodern
thought—and he, while neither accepting nor rejecting the label, says he is “a
novelist, period. An American novelist” (DePietro)—his novels certainly seem
to be more in the vein of critics such as Fredric Jameson who see Postmodern-
ism as a recent stage of capitalist transformation, one in which all experience is
commodified, made commercial. DeLillo’s project, in terms of the entire range
of his novels, is to rethink the history of the post–World War II era. Thus, sev-
eral of his books focus either on specific historical moments—Libra (1988) with
its reimagining of President Kennedy’s assassination or Falling Man (2007) and
its treatment of the 9/11 terrorist attacks—or on the feel of a moment in the
recent past, as in Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), and White Noise (1985).
Don DeLillo was born in New York City on 20 November 1936. The son
of Italian immigrants, DeLillo grew up in the Bronx and for a brief time in
Pennsylvania. His was the typical childhood for working-class boys of the time,
complete with makeshift sports in the streets, card games and pool, punctuated
by Catholic Mass on a regular basis. DeLillo has said that he was not a voracious
reader as a child, but a high school summer job as a park attendant gave him
the time he needed, and he eagerly read Faulkner, Joyce, Melville, and found
his interest in the function and feel of language stimulated. After graduating
from Fordham University with a degree in communication arts, DeLillo went
to work as a copywriter in an advertising agency, a job he pursued for five years
before deciding that he wanted to try something else. His first short story was
published in 1960; eleven years later his first novel, Americana, was published.
In 1975 DeLillo married Barbara Bennett; they live outside of New York City.
Between 1972 and 1982 he published seven more novels, mostly well reviewed but
none reaching the level of acclaim and interest achieved by White Noise in 1985. It