Don DeLillo

Stephen Burn (University of Glasgow)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 20 Nov 1936
Activity 1960-ongoing

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Novelist

Resources

The thirteen novels Don DeLillo has written, between 1971 and 2003, have earned him a reputation as one of America's leading contemporary writers. Academic studies have made a case for him as “the most gifted stylist in American letters today”, while his engagement with subtle changes in American society has established him as an important influence on younger novelists, like David Foster Wallace who describes DeLillo as a “true prophet of . . . U.S. fiction.” DeLillo's novels anatomise the media and technological obsessions of America, finding a mix of modern paranoia and primitive fear at the heart of the contemporary self which he explores by writing about terrorism, celebrity, writers, mathematicians and the crucial shaping e…

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3910 words

Citation: Burn, Stephen. "Don DeLillo". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 October 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=1214, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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