Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American essayist, novelist, playwright, and short story writer. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. He currently lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist for Mao II and Underworld (1992 and 1998, respectively), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II in 1992 (receiving a further PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Angel Esmeralda in 2012), and was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010. DeLillo has described his fiction as being influenced by " the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times", and in a 2005 interview declared, "Writers must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
Read more about Don DeLillo: Early Life and Influences, Plays, Themes and Criticism, References in Popular Culture, List of Works, Awards and Award Nominations, Further Reading
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“America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)
“If music in general is an imitation of history, opera in particular is an imitation of human willfulness; it is rooted in the fact that we not only have feelings but insist upon having them at whatever cost to ourselves.... The quality common to all the great operatic roles, e.g., Don Giovanni, Norma, Lucia, Tristan, Isolde, Brünnhilde, is that each of them is a passionate and willful state of being. In real life they would all be bores, even Don Giovanni.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)