Don DeLillo was born in 1936 and was raised in
a working class Italian Catholic family in New York City in the Bronx district.
As a teenager, he read such authors as William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and
James Joyce. DeLillo’s writing style was further shaped by jazz music (Miles
Davis, Coltrane) and cinema (Antonioni, Truffaut, Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola
and Altman). He affirms: "European and Asian cinemas of the 1960s
shaped the way I think and feel about things. […] Perhaps, in an indirect way,
cinema allowed me to become a writer."
DeLillo has written fifteen novels, including Americana (1971), Libra (1988), Underworld
(1997), Mao II (1991), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007) and Point
Omega (2010). He is the author of five plays: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (1986), Valparaiso
(1999), Love-Lies-Bleeding (2006)
and The World for Snow (2007).
DeLillo also publishes essays and short stories (The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories in 2011). In his works, he
explores such themes as art, language, Cold War, technology, mass media, sports,
consumerism and terrorism, to name a few. During the interview in 2005, he
defined the role of a writer in a following way: "Writers must oppose
systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and
the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments [...] I
think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to
impose on us."
He received many literary prizes, for instance,
the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, The Jerusalem
Prize, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and
Letters as well as the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American
Fiction.
by Marta MakoĊ
Selected sources:
Further reading:
