received the National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics
Circle Award. His follow-up in 1988, Libra, was a National Book Award finalist,
appeared on The New York Times Best Books of the Year list, and received the Aer
Lingus International Fiction Prize in 1989. It also received much media attention
due, largely, to its subject matter—Lee Harvey Oswald and a myriad of plots and
conspiracies leading up to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Its treatment of our
cultural relationship to history and the strong strains of paranoia in contemporary
American culture resonated with audiences and critics alike. DeLillo followed Libra
with Mao II in 1991; it won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. Many consider
Underworld (1997) to be DeLillo’s magnum opus, although at more than eight
hundred pages, it is less commonly taught on high-school and college campuses
than is White Noise. Underworld was a finalist for the National Book Award and the
Pulitzer Prize and received the American Book Award, the Jerusalem Prize, and the
William Dean Howells Medal. Under the title “Pafko at the Wall” the first section
originally appeared as a novella in Harper’s magazine in October 1992. A brilliant
evocation of the intermingling personalities, famous and ordinary, historical and
fictional, at the 1951 Giants-Dodgers pennant game, culminating in a ninth-inning
homerun “heard round the world,” the first section of Underworld also documents
the moment when news comes that the Soviets have detonated a nuclear bomb.
These elements are intertwined throughout the novel Underworld: the Cold War,
baseball and the young man who caught the game-winning ball, bombs, historical
figures such as Lenny Bruce and J. Edgar Hoover, and ordinary people, all literally
and figuratively trying to deal with the “waste” produced by their world.
DeLillo has followed Underworld with four short novels: The Body Artist
(2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man, and Point Omega (2010). He is also the
author of four plays. One of his novels, Amazons (1980), was written under the
pseudonym Cleo Birdwell and presents itself as the memoir of the first woman
to play in the National Hockey League.
As his influences DeLillo names New York City, the paintings in the
Museum of Modern Art, jazz, and the movies of Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc
Godard, and Howard Hawks. In addition, the assassination of John F. Kennedy
and the existence of the Zapruder film have been a long-term fascination and
explain in part his interest in the idea of the simulacrum, the image of an image.
In a 1988 interview with William Goldstein he says that the Zapruder film (the
home movie taken of the Kennedy assassination by private citizen Abraham
Zapruder) was “one of the things that informed my subsequent, or all my work.
... The notion of a medium between an event and an audience, film and televi-
sion in particular. The irony is that we have film of the assassination and yet it
is still remote” (Publishers Weekly, 19 August 1988).
At the center of White Noise is Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler Stud-
ies at the fictional College-on-the-Hill, and his family and extended families
that have developed through marriages, divorces, and remarriages. As they go
about their daily lives, Jack’s family operates in the midst of a constant barrage
of “white noise”—the sound of their clothes dryer, toasters, television, radios,
brand names. It is a world in which all experience, even sex, seems to be medi-
ated; only the fear of death offers heightened awareness.