Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in the Bronx, New York, and was raised in the Italian-American neighborhood of Fordham. DeLillo grew up on a steady diet of sports, cards and billiards, and didn't become interested in writing until his late teens, when he delved into reading to pass time at a summer job parking cars. DeLillo attended Cardinal Hayes High School and headed to Fordham University after graduation, majoring in communication arts. Although he wanted a job in publishing following his graduation from Fordham (1958), DeLillo couldn't find one, so he went into advertising instead. He worked as a copywriter while crafting short stories on the side, and his first story, "The River Jordan," was published two years later in Epoch, the literary magazine of Cornell University. DeLillo is the author of fourteen novels, including Falling Man, Libra and White Noise, and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2006, Underworld was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times Book Review, and in 2000 it won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years.