1970s 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. 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." Later still, DeLillo continued to feel 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."—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." DeLillo has said it was both one of the most difficult books for him to write and his personal favorite. 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. 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. While DeLillo was living in Greece, he took three years who had first tracked DeLillo down for an interview while he was in Greece in 1979. On that occasion, DeLillo handed LeClair a business card with his name printed on it and beneath that the message "I don't want to talk about it."
White Noise's influence can be seen in the writing of
David Foster Wallace,
Jonathan Lethem,
Jonathan Franzen,
Dave Eggers,
Zadie Smith and
Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of the novel). In 2005 DeLillo said "White Noise" was a fine choice, adding, "Once a title is affixed to a book, it becomes as indelible as a sentence or a paragraph." The novel also elicited fierce critical division, with some critics praising DeLillo's take on the Kennedy assassination while others decried it.
George Will, in
The Washington Post, declared the book an affront to America and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship". DeLillo responded "I don't take it seriously, but being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job." This would become the prologue of his epic Cold War history
Underworld. DeLillo took inspiration from the October 4, 1951, front page of
The New York Times, which juxtaposed Thomson's home-run alongside the news that the
Soviet Union had tested a
hydrogen bomb. The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic
Martin Amis saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer."
Harold Bloom called it "the culmination of what Don can do."
Underworld went on to become one of DeLillo's most acclaimed novels to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book Award and
The New York Times Best Books of the Year in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998. DeLillo later expressed surprise at
Underworld's success. In 2007, he remarked: "When I finished with
Underworld, I didn't really have any all-too-great hopes, to be honest. It's some pretty complicated stuff: 800 pages, more than 100 different characters—who's going to be interested in that?" DeLillo has said of this shift to shorter novels, "If a longer novel announces itself, I'll write it. A novel creates its own structure and develops its own terms. I tend to follow. And I never try to stretch what I sense is a compact book." DeLillo's papers were acquired in 2004 by the
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the
University of Texas at Austin, reputedly for "half a million dollars".
Cosmopolis, eventually released in 2012, became the first direct adaptation for the screen of a DeLillo novel, although both
Libra and
Underworld had previously been optioned for screen treatments. There were discussions about adapting
End Zone, and DeLillo has written an original screenplay for the film
Game 6. DeLillo ended the decade by making an unexpected appearance at a
PEN event on the steps of the
New York Public Library in support of Chinese dissident writer
Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" on December 31, 2009.
2010s DeLillo published
Point Omega, his 15th novel, in February 2010. According to DeLillo, the novel considers an idea from "the writing of the Jesuit thinker and paleontologist [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin." Reviews were polarized, with some saying the novel was a return to form and innovative, while others complained about its brevity and lack of plot and engaging characters. Upon its initial release,
Point Omega spent one week on
The New York Times Best Seller list, peaking at No. 35 on the extended version of the list during its one-week stay on the list. In a January 29, 2010, interview with
The Wall Street Journal, DeLillo discussed at great length
Point Omega, his views of writing, and his plans for the future. When asked why his recent novels had been shorter, DeLillo replied, "Each book tells me what it wants or what it is, and I'd be perfectly content to write another long novel. It just has to happen." and his second
PEN Award, the
PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, on October 13, 2010. DeLillo's first collection of short stories,
The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories, covering short stories published between 1979 and 2011, was published in November 2011. It received favorable reviews and was a finalist for both the 2012
Story Prize award and the 2012
PEN/Faulkner, as well as being longlisted for the
Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award.
New York Times Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger praised it, saying, "DeLillo packs fertile ruminations and potent consolation into each of these rich, dense, concentrated stories." DeLillo received the 2012 Carl Sandburg Literary Award on October 17, 2012, on the campus of the
University of Illinois at Chicago. The prize is "presented annually to an acclaimed author in recognition of outstanding contributions to the literary world and honors a significant work or body of work that has enhanced the public's awareness of the written word." On January 29, 2013,
Variety announced that
Luca Guadagnino would direct an adaptation of
The Body Artist called
Body Art. On April 26, 2013, it was announced that DeLillo had received the inaugural
Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (formerly the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction), with the presentation of the award due to take place during the 2013
National Book Festival, Sept. 21–22, 2013. The prize honors "an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something about the American experience." In August 2015, DeLillo's publisher Simon & Schuster announced that the novel,
Zero K, would be published in May 2016. The advanced blurb for the novel is as follows: Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a George Soros-like billionaire now in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a deeply remote and secret compound where death is controlled and bodies are preserved until a future moment when medicine and technology can reawaken them. Jeffrey joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body. Ross Lockhart is not driven by the hope for immortality, for power and wealth beyond the grave. He is driven by love for his wife, for Artis, without whom he feels life is not worth living. It is that which compels him to submit to death long before his time. Jeffrey heartily disapproves. He is committed to living, to "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth. "Thus begins an emotionally resonant novel that weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, death—against the beauty of everyday life; love, awe, "the intimate touch of earth and sun." Brilliantly observed and infused with humor, Don Delillo's
Zero K is an acute observation about the fragility and meaning of life, about embracing our family, this world, our language, and our humanity. In his acceptance speech, DeLillo reflected upon his career as a reader as well as a writer, recalling examining his personal book collection and feeling a profound sense of personal connection to literature: "Here I'm not the writer at all, I'm a grateful reader. When I look at my bookshelves I find myself gazing like a museum-goer." In February 2016, DeLillo was the guest of honor at an academic conference dedicated to his work, "Don DeLillo: Fiction Rescues History", a three-day event at the
Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Speaking to
The Guardian in November 2018, DeLillo revealed he was working on a new novel, his 17th, "set three years in the future. But I'm not trying to imagine the future in the usual terms. I'm trying to imagine what has been torn apart and what can be put back together, and I don't know the answer. I hope I can arrive at an answer through writing the fiction."
2020s DeLillo's 17th novel,
The Silence, was published by
Scribner in October 2020. In February 2021, producer
Uri Singer acquired the rights to the novel; later the same year, reports emerged that the playwright
Jez Butterworth was planning to adapt
The Silence for the screen. The first
Library of America volume of DeLillo's writings was published in October 2022. The volume, titled
Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s, collects the three major works DeLillo published during the decade:
The Names (1982),
White Noise (1985), and
Libra (1988). The volume also features two nonfiction essays by DeLillo: "American Blood", about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and
Jack Ruby, and "Silhouette City", about
neo-Nazis in contemporary America. It was edited by the DeLillo scholar Mark Osteen.
Mao II and
Underworld were anthologized in 2023. He is one of a handful of authors so anthologized while alive; others include
Eudora Welty,
Philip Roth and
Ursula K. Le Guin. ==Plays==