born Nov. 20, 1936, New York, N.Y., U.S.
U.S. novelist.
Born to immigrant parents, DeLillo worked in advertising before beginning to write seriously. His postmodernist works portray the unrest and alienation of an America cosseted by material excess and stupefied by empty mass culture and politics. Ratner's Star (1976) attracted attention with its baroque comic sense and verbal facility. His vision later turned darker and his characters more willful in their destructiveness and ignorance, as in Players (1977) and White Noise (1985). Libra (1988) portrays Lee Harvey Oswald , Underworld (1997) portrays 1950s America, and The Body Artist (2001) centres on a woman who has to deal with the fact of her husband's suicide.