Happy 87th birthday, Don DeLillo. In Episode 5: The Lives of DeLillo (1), the first in a planned series about biography, DDSWTNP offer long-time and first-time readers alike new avenues into his work by discussing the first 30 years of his life, as he grew from the son of Italian immigrants and student of Jesuit scholars to the writer of his first published stories. This episode’s many topics include teenage DeLillo reading the modernist canon in a New York park, his time as “failed ascetic” during college at Fordham, the weight of the Bronx on his earliest fiction, his pivotal copywriting work under advertising guru David Ogilvy, and how the eventual author of Libra reacted on the day JFK was shot. #mythologyofamerica #spaghettiandmeatballs #howtowriteabiography #catholicritual #quittingtowrite #dregsofhiswork

We also announce in this episode our call for recorded contributions from our listeners! Be a part of our end-of-2023 tribute to our favorite DeLillo passages by heading to Speakpipe and recording yours, in two minutes or less. Deadline is December 10. Go to https://www.speakpipe.com/delillopodcast

Critical texts, stories, and essays referred to in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “The River Jordan,” Epoch 10.2 (Winter 1960): 105-120.

 

---, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” Epoch 12.1 (Spring 1962): 9-25.

---, “Spaghetti and Meatballs,” Epoch 14.3 (Spring 1965): 244-250.

---, “Coming Sun. Mon. Tues.,” Kenyon Review 28.3 (June 1966): 391-394.

---, “Baghdad Towers West,” Epoch 17.3 (Spring 1968): 195-217.

---, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room.” Acceptance speech for the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, 1999.

DeRosa, Aaron, “Don DeLillo, Madison Avenue, and the Aesthetics of Postwar Fiction,” Contemporary Literature 59.1 (Spring 2018): 50-80.

Veggian, Henry. Understanding Don DeLillo. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014.

Interviews with DeLillo referred to in this episode:

Tom LeClair (1979) and Anne Arensberg (1988):

Collected in Thomas DePietro, ed., Conversations with Don DeLillo, University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Vince Passaro (1991):

https://www.nytimes.com/1991/05/19/magazine/dangerous-don-delillo.html

Gordon Burn (1991):

“Wired Up and Whacked Out,” The Sunday Times (London), August 25, 1991 (magazine): 6-39.

Adam Begley (1993): 

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo

Mark Binelli (2007): 

https://www.guernicamag.com/intensity_of_a_plot/

PEN (2010): 

https://pen.org/an-interview-with-don-delillo/

Robert McCrum (2010):

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/don-delillo-mccrum-interview

Finally, a great source for interview excerpts and so many other things DeLillo:

Don DeLillo’s America: http://perival.com/delillo/delillo.html