American · b. 1936
Don DeLillo has chronicled American paranoia and media saturation for half a century. His 1985 novel "White Noise" won the National Book Award for its portrait of a professor of Hitler studies confronting death and toxic events. "Libra" reimagined the Kennedy assassination; "Underworld" opened with a legendary baseball game and sprawled across Cold War America. The American author writes sentences that capture the hum of contemporary anxiety. His prose makes visible the systems—corporate, technological, conspiratorial—that shape daily life.