Don DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and is an American novelist, playwright and essayist. He has written fifteen novels including Point Omerga, Zero K, Underworld, Falling Man, White Noise and Libra. Most of Don DeLillo’s novels examine life and culture in America and deal with postmodern thematics such as consumption, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family and the search for Self.
Don DeLillo on what made him write and become a Writer:
I have an idea but I’m not sure I believe it. Maybe I wanted to learn how to think. Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them. Maybe I wanted to find more rigorous ways of thinking. We’re talking now about the earliest writing I did and about the power of language to counteract the wallow of late adolescence, to define things, define muddled experience in economical ways.
Don DeLillo on his linguistic jumble of English and Italian:
The Italian I heard was not standard Italian. It was dialect, so it didn’t teach me anything beyond dirty words. I spoke Bronx English. The only Italian I spoke was slang with my friends.
