Books Written by Don DeLillo

An American novelist, born in New York City in 1936, best known for White Noise (1985), Libra (1988) and Underworld (1997). He has published seventeen novels under his own name, about television, advertising, conspiracy, terrorism and the fear of death in American life. He won the National Book Award for White Noise in 1985 and lives near New York City.

Yes. As of October 2026 he is alive and 89; he was born on 20 November 1936 and turns 90 in November 2026. He lives in Bronxville, just north of New York City, and received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2025.

Seventeen novels under his own name, from Americana (1971) to The Silence (2020). He also co-wrote Amazons (1980) under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and published one story collection, The Angel Esmeralda (2011), and four plays. This page covers twelve key novels in detail and lists the rest below.

Americana (1971), End Zone (1972), Great Jones Street (1973), Ratner’s Star (1976), Players (1977), Running Dog (1978), Amazons (1980, as Cleo Birdwell), The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991), Underworld (1997), The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), Falling Man (2007), Point Omega (2010), Zero K (2016) and The Silence (2020).

Start with White Noise (1985), his most famous and most widely read novel: it is funny, short and has all his main themes. His other most admired books are Libra (1988), Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997), which is often called his masterpiece. Read Libra or Mao II next and save the 800-page Underworld for when you know his style.

Underworld (1997) follows a home-run baseball through fifty years of the Cold War. It opens at the 1951 game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, on the day the Soviet Union’s atomic test became news, and then moves back and forth in time around Nick Shay, a man from the Bronx who works in waste management. It runs to more than 800 pages, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and won the William Dean Howells Medal in 2000.

White Noise (1985) is a comic novel about Jack Gladney, a professor of Hitler studies, and his wife Babette, whose fear of death is brought to the surface when a chemical spill creates an “airborne toxic event” over their town. It won the National Book Award in 1985. Noah Baumbach’s film, with Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle, opened the Venice Film Festival on 31 August 2022 and was released on Netflix on 30 December 2022.

Libra (1988) is a novel about Lee Harvey Oswald and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It follows Oswald from his childhood in the Bronx and New Orleans to Dallas in November 1963, alongside an invented plot by disaffected CIA men to stage a failed attempt on the president. The columnist George Will called it “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship”; DeLillo replied that being called a bad citizen was a compliment to a novelist.

Yes, twice. In December 2001 he published the essay “In the Ruins of the Future” in Harper’s Magazine, about the attacks, terrorism and America. His novel Falling Man (2007) follows Keith Neudecker, who walks out of the burning World Trade Center, and his family in the months after.

Mao II (1991) is about Bill Gray, a reclusive novelist who has not published in years and agrees to be photographed, then is drawn into an attempt to free a hostage held in Beirut. It asks whether terrorists and crowds have taken the novelist’s place in shaping how people see the world. It won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992 and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Two so far: Cosmopolis (2012), directed by David Cronenberg with Robert Pattinson, the first direct screen adaptation of a DeLillo novel, and White Noise (2022), directed by Noah Baumbach. DeLillo also wrote the original screenplay for Game 6 (2005). The screen rights to The Silence were bought in 2021, with Jez Butterworth reported to be writing the adaptation.

Barbara Bennett. They married in 1975; she is a former banker who became a landscape designer. The couple live in Bronxville, New York.

Yes. Amazons (1980) is a comic mock memoir of Cleo Birdwell, the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, published under her name and written by DeLillo with a former co-worker, Sue Buck. He kept it out of print and off his bibliographies for decades, then agreed to a reissue in 2026: Scribner in the US and Penguin in the UK publish it in November 2026, credited to Cleo Birdwell “with Don DeLillo”.

James Joyce first: in his 1993 Paris Review interview DeLillo said that Joyce taught him to see “something in language that carried a radiance”. In the same interview he recalls reading Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Light in August, and finding in James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan that a life like his own could be the subject of fiction. He has also named Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor and William Gaddis, and, outside books, jazz, European films and abstract expressionist painting.

The National Book Award for White Noise (1985), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II (1992), the Jerusalem Prize (1999), the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld (2000), the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction (2010), the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (2013), the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (2015) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Fiction (2025). Mao II and Underworld were Pulitzer Prize finalists, but he has never won the Pulitzer.

Usually duh-LIL-oh, with the stress on the second syllable; some dictionaries give duh-LEE-loh. The name is often misspelled DeLilo, Dellilo, Dililo or De Lillo: it is written as one word, DeLillo, with a capital L.

He grew up in an Italian-American part of the Bronx, went to Cardinal Hayes High School and graduated from Fordham University in 1958 with a degree in communication arts. He then worked as an advertising copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather until 1964 before turning to fiction.

His latest novel is The Silence (2020), a 128-page book about a night in 2022 when every screen in the world goes dark. No new novel has been announced as of October 2026; his next book is the November 2026 reissue of Amazons. The Library of America collects his work in Three Novels of the 1980s (2022) and Mao II & Underworld (2023).