Theme: Experimentation in American literature Group: 223 Done by: Nurmuratova Laylo Supervisor: Abdumalikova Fotima

2.7. Donald Richard DeLillo

DeLillo was born in New York City and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family with ties to Molise, Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx not far from Arthur Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo said he was "always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English".

As a teenager, DeLillo was not interested in writing until a summer job as a parking attendant, where hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a reading habit. Reflecting on this period, in a 2010 interview, he stated, "I had a personal golden age of reading in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time". Among the writers DeLillo read and was inspired by in this period were James Joyce, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Ernest Hemingway, who was a major influence on DeLillo's earliest attempts at writing in his late teens.

As well as the influence of modernist fiction, DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music—"guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis"—and postwar cinema: "Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut, and then in the '70s came the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: Kubrick, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese and so on. I don't know how they may have affected the way I write, but I do have a visual sense". Of the influence of film, particularly European cinema, on his work, DeLillo has said, "European and Asian cinemas of the 1960s shaped the way I think and feel about things. At that time I was living in New York, I didn't have much money, didn't have much work, I was living in one room...I was a man in a small room. And I went to the movies a lot, watching Bergman, Antonioni, Godard. When I was little, in the Bronx, I didn't go to the cinema, and I didn't think of the American films I saw as works of art. Perhaps, in an indirect way, cinema allowed me to become a writer." He also credits his parents' leniency and acceptance of his desire to write for encouraging him to pursue a literary career: "They ultimately trusted me to follow the course I’d chosen. This is something that happens if you’re the eldest son in an Italian family: You get a certain leeway, and it worked in my case".

After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1954 and from Fordham University in the Bronx with a bachelor's degree in communication arts in 1958, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he could not get one in publishing. He worked for five years as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather on Fifth Avenue,writing image ads for Sears Roebuck among others, working on "Print ads, very undistinguished accounts....I hadn’t made the leap to television. I was just getting good at it when I left, in 1964".

DeLillo published his first short story in 1960—"The River Jordan", in Epoch, Cornell University's literary magazine—and began to work on his first novel in 1966. Of the beginning of his writing career, DeLillo has said, "I did some short stories at that time but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore." Reflecting in 1993 on his relatively late start in writing fiction, DeLillo said, "I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn’t have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this".

DeLillo's inaugural decade of novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing and publication of six novels between 1971 and 1978.

He resigned from the advertising industry in 1964, moved into a modest apartment near the Queens-Midtown Tunnel ("It wasn’t Paris in the 1920s, but I was happy"), and began work on his first novel.Of the early days of his writing career, he remarked: "I lived in a very minimal kind of way. My telephone would be $4.20 every month. I was paying a rent of sixty dollars a month. And I was becoming a writer. So in one sense, I was ignoring the movements of the time."His first novel, Americana, was written over four years[5] and finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. Americana concerned "a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture".

DeLillo revised the novel in 1989 for paperback reprinting. Reflecting on the novel later in his career, he said, "I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published".Later still, DeLillo still felt a degree of surprise that Americana was published: "I was working on my first novel, Americana, for two years before I ever realized that I could be a writer. I had absolutely no assurance that this book would be published because I knew that there were elements that I simply didn't know how to improve at that point. So I wrote for another two years and finished the novel. It wasn’t all that difficult to find a publisher, to my astonishment. I didn't have a representative. I didn’t know anything about publishing. But an editor at Houghton Mifflin read the manuscript and decided that this was worth pursuing".

Americana was followed in rapid succession by the American college football or nuclear war black comedy End Zone (1972)—written under the working titles "The Self-Erasing Word" and "Modes of Disaster Technology"and the rock and roll satire Great Jones Street (1973), which DeLillo later felt was "one of the books I wish I’d done differently. It should be tighter, and probably a little funnier".He married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned landscape designer, in 1975.

DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976)—which according to DeLillo is "structure on the writings of Lewis Carroll, in particular Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass[4]—took two years to write[15] and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon. This "conceptual monster", as DeLillo scholar Tom LeClair has called it, is "the picaresque story of a 14-year-old math genius who joins an international consortium of mad scientists decoding an alien message". DeLillo has said it was both one of the most difficult books for him to write and his personal favorite of his novels.

Following this early attempt at a major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. Players (1977), originally conceived as "based on what could be called the intimacy of language—what people who live together really sound like",concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as the husband gets involved with a cell of domestic terrorists. Its 1978 successor, Running Dog (1978), written in four months,[13] was a thriller about a hunt for a celluloid reel of Hitler's sexual exploits.

Of Running Dog, DeLillo remarked, "What I was really getting at in Running Dog was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don't care about this so much anyway. This was something I felt characterized our lives at the time the book was written in the mid to late seventies. I think this was part of American consciousness then".

In 1978, DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Greece, where he wrote his next novels, Amazons and The Names.

Of his first six novels and his rapid writing turnover later in his career, DeLillo said, "I wasn't learning to slow down and examine what I was doing more closely. I don't have regrets about that work, but I do think that if I had been a bit less hasty in starting each new book, I might have produced somewhat better work in the 1970s. My first novel took so long and was such an effort that once I was free of it, I almost became carefree in a sense and moved right through the decade, stopping, in a way, only at Ratner's Star (1976), which was an enormous challenge for me and probably a bigger challenge for the reader. But I slowed down in the 1980s and '90s."DeLillo has also acknowledged some of the weaknesses of his 1970s works, reflecting in 2007: "I knew I wasn’t doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way".