"In the 1970s, when I started writing novels, I was a figure in the margins, and that's where I belonged. If I'm headed back that way, that's fine with me, because that's always where I felt I belonged. Things changed for me in the 1980s and 1990s, but I've always preferred to be somewhere in the corner of a room, observing."
—From the 2010 The Sunday Times interview
Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American author of several acclaimed novels. They were noted for painting a detailed portrait of American life in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
The literary critic Harold Bloom has distinguished him as one of the four greatest American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth.
Bibliography
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Novels
- Americana (1971)
- End Zone (1972)
- Great Jones Street (1973)
- Ratner's Star (1976)
- Players (1977)
- Running Dog (1978)
- The Names (1982)
- White Noise (1985)
- Libra (1988)
- Mao II (1991)
- Underworld (1997)
- The Body Artist (2001)
- Cosmopolis (2003)
- Falling Man (2007)
- Point Omega (2010)
- Zero K (2016)
- The Silence (2020)
Short stories collection
- The Angel Esmeralda (2011)
Tropes found in his works:
- Beige Prose: DeLillo's later works, beginning with The Body Artist and onwards, are these.
- Black Comedy: A major staple in his work.
- Doorstopper: DeLillo wrote only one long novel, Underworld, and lo, it's extremely long, clocking at 827 pages. Even several highbrow critics agree that it's too long.
- Fake–Real Turn: In Libra, this is how the assassination of JFK happened. It started as a false flag operation to fake a failed assassination attempt but became real through a process that will never be fully understood.
