How a Bronx parking attendant became the novelist of White Noise
Don DeLillo quit an advertising job in 1964 not to write, he said, but simply to stop working. He was living on sixty dollars a month in rent near the Queens–Midtown Tunnel, and it took him four years to finish a first novel he later called overdone and shaggy.
A New Yorker from birth on November 20, 1936, DeLillo grew up among Italian Americans in the Bronx, eleven people sharing a small house where English and Italian blurred together and a grandmother never learned English at all. Writing held no interest for him until a summer job minding parked cars left long idle hours to fill; reading Joyce, Faulkner, O'Connor and above all Hemingway followed. Jazz and the European films of Antonioni, Godard and Bergman, watched while he lived alone in one room, fed his visual sense.
After Fordham, he could not find publishing work, so he spent five years writing print ads at Ogilvy & Mather. His first short story appeared in Cornell's magazine Epoch in 1960. Once he left advertising, the pace surprised even him: six novels between 1971 and 1978, from Americana through the football and nuclear-war comedy End Zone to Ratner's Star, a Lewis Carroll-shaped tale of a fourteen-year-old maths prodigy decoding an alien signal, which he calls both his hardest book and his favourite. He later admitted he was not doing utterly serious work in that decade.
A Guggenheim Fellowship in 1978 took him to the Middle East and then Greece, where he wrote The Names and, under the pen name Cleo Birdwell, the comic hockey novel Amazons, which he later asked bibliographers to leave out. He shunned interviews for years; when the scholar Tom LeClair tracked him down, DeLillo handed over a card printed with his name and a line saying he did not want to talk about it.
Recognition arrived with White Noise, which won the National Book Award in 1985. Libra, about the Kennedy assassination, came three years later, then Mao II, which took the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Underworld, spanning the Cold War to the internet. The Jerusalem Prize and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction followed.
Source: Don DeLillo
