Publication Order of Standalone Novels
| Americana | 1971 |
| End Zone | 1972 |
| Great Jones Street | 1973 |
| Ratner’s Star | 1976 |
| Players | 1977 |
| Running Dog | 1978 |
| Amazons (As: Cleo Birdwell) | 1980 |
| 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 |
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas
| Pafko at the Wall | 2001 |
Publication Order of Short Story Collections
| The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories | 2011 |
About Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is an American novelist, born in New York City on 20 November 1936, who has also written short stories, plays and essays. He is the author of “White Noise”, which won the National Book Award, along with “Libra”, “Mao II” and “Underworld”. His subjects include consumerism, nuclear war, television, terrorism, sport and the workings of language.
DeLillo grew up in a Catholic, Italian-American family in the Belmont area of the Bronx. He graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School in 1954 and from Fordham University in 1958 with a degree in communication arts, then spent five years as a copywriter at the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. He left advertising in 1964 and began work on his first novel, “Americana”, which took four years to write and appeared in 1971. It follows a television network programmer who takes to the road.
Six novels came out between 1971 and 1978, and by the mid 1980s he had a cult following. “White Noise” (1985) brought him a much wider readership. “Libra” (1988) is a novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and “Mao II” (1991), about terrorism and the scrutiny of writers’ private lives, won the PEN/Faulkner Award. “Underworld” (1997) runs from the early Cold War to the birth of the internet and won the William Dean Howells Medal. He also wrote “Amazons” (1980), a comic novel about the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell.
His later novels are shorter: “The Body Artist”, “Cosmopolis”, “Falling Man”, “Point Omega”, “Zero K” and, most recently, “The Silence”, published by Scribner in October 2020. “The Angel Esmeralda” (2011) is his only story collection and gathers nine stories written between 1979 and 2011. He has written five major plays, among them “The Day Room” and “Valparaiso”.
David Cronenberg filmed “Cosmopolis” in 2012 with Robert Pattinson, the first direct screen adaptation of a DeLillo novel, and Noah Baumbach’s “White Noise” followed in 2022 with Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig. DeLillo’s honours include the Jerusalem Prize (1999), the PEN/Saul Bellow Award (2010), the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2013) and the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2015). He lives in Bronxville, near New York City, with his wife, Barbara Bennett.
Photo: Thousand Robots, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).