De Lillo, Don

De Lillo, Don (1936–), novelist born in New York City and educated at Fordham. His works include Americana (1971), about a TV executive who outgrows his business; End Zone (1972), which brought him major critical attention, like other of his novels is an existential comedy, its theme football as metaphor for both anomie and atomic war, with down‐home characters. Great Jones Street (1973) concerns the worlds of jazz and drugs; Ratner's Star (1976) is a grim, surreal novel, its protagonist a 14‐year‐old mathematical genius and Nobel laureate, Billy Twillig, whose mission is to decode the message of a star and to invent a mathematical language to answer it. After Players (1977), about rich New Yorkers caught in terrorism, Running Dog (1978), on spies and murder, and The Names (1982), about a corrupt American expatriate in Athens, De Lillo published White Noise (1985), by general consent his best book, with rich characters depicted in minimalist language. Jack Gladney is chairman of Hitler Studies (a department he pioneered) at a small college. He is secretly trying to learn German for a forthcoming conference he is sponsoring. A toxic gas spill threatens him and his family, causing them to flee. The plot and characters are at once real and weird. In Libra (1988) Oswald's shooting of President Kennedy becomes a national allegory. Mao II (1991) concerns CIA operatives in Greece. His novel Underworld (1997) was nominated for the American Book Award. Other recent novels by De Lillo are The Body Artist (2001) and Cosmopolis (2003).