116-522: Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as consumerism, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, television, the advent of the Digital Age , mathematics, politics, economics, and sports. DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and
232-447: A philosophical novel and maybe, considering its themes, the book shares a place in my work with The Body Artist , another novel of abbreviated length." Reviews were polarized, with some saying the novel was a return to form and innovative, while others complained about its brevity and lack of plot and engaging characters. Upon its initial release, Point Omega spent one week on The New York Times Best Seller list , peaking at No. 35 on
348-535: A March 2010 interview, it was reported that DeLillo's deliberate stylistic shift had been informed by his having recently reread several slim but seminal European novels, including Albert Camus 's The Stranger , Peter Handke 's The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick , and Max Frisch 's Man in the Holocene . After the publication and extensive publicity drive for Underworld , DeLillo once again retreated from
464-518: A complex thriller about "a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East". While lauded by an increasing number of critics, DeLillo was still relatively unknown outside small academic circles and did not reach a wide readership with this novel. Also in 1982, DeLillo finally broke his self-imposed ban on media coverage by giving his first major interview to Tom LeClair , who had first tracked DeLillo down for an interview while he
580-511: A connection, and nearly half of Americans and people in several other countries used the Internet on a regular basis. However throughout the 1990s, "getting online" entailed complicated configuration, and dial-up was the only connection type affordable by individual users; the present day mass Internet culture was not possible. In 1989, about 15% of all households in the United States owned
696-474: A copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather on Fifth Avenue , writing image ads for Sears Roebuck among others, working on "Print ads, very undistinguished accounts....I hadn't made the leap to television. I was just getting good at it when I left, in 1964." DeLillo published his first short story in 1960—"The River Jordan", in Epoch , Cornell University 's literary magazine—and began to work on his first novel in 1966. Of
812-512: A dedicated home video game console according to an Entertainment Software Association annual industry report . By 2012, over 2 billion people used the Internet, twice the number using it in 2007. Cloud computing had entered the mainstream by the early 2010s. In January 2013, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported owning a smartphone . By 2016, half of the world's population was connected and as of 2020, that number has risen to 67%. In
928-421: A degree of surprise that Americana was published: "I was working on my first novel, Americana , for two years before I ever realized that I could be a writer [...] I had absolutely no assurance that this book would be published because I knew that there were elements that I simply didn't know how to improve at that point. So I wrote for another two years and finished the novel. It wasn't all that difficult to find
1044-618: A dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. By the early 1980s, along with improvements in computing power , the proliferation of the smaller and less expensive personal computers allowed for immediate access to information and the ability to share and store it. Connectivity between computers within organizations enabled access to greater amounts of information. The world's technological capacity to store information grew from 2.6 (optimally compressed ) exabytes (EB) in 1986 to 15.8 EB in 1993; over 54.5 EB in 2000; and to 295 (optimally compressed) EB in 2007. This
1160-652: A half of material.") Written with the working titles "American Blood" and "Texas School Book", Libra became an international bestseller, one of five finalists for the National Book Award, and the winner of the next year's Irish Times Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. The novel also elicited fierce critical division, with some critics praising DeLillo's take on the Kennedy assassination while others decried it. George Will , in The Washington Post , declared
1276-460: A human brain has been estimated to lie between 10^15 and 10^17. While this number is impressive, even in 2007 humanity's general-purpose computers were capable of performing well over 10^18 instructions per second. Estimates suggest that the storage capacity of an individual human brain is about 10^12 bytes. On a per capita basis, this is matched by current digital storage (5x10^21 bytes per 7.2x10^9 people). Genetic code may also be considered part of
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#17328518117461392-524: A literary career: "They ultimately trusted me to follow the course I'd chosen. This is something that happens if you're the eldest son in an Italian family: You get a certain leeway, and it worked in my case." After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1954 and from Fordham University with a bachelor's degree in communication arts in 1958, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he could not get one in publishing. He worked for five years as
1508-400: A major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. Players (1977), originally conceived as "based on what could be called the intimacy of language—what people who live together really sound like", concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as the husband gets involved with a cell of domestic terrorists. Its 1978 successor, Running Dog (1978), written in four months, was
1624-522: A mock memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, is a far more lighthearted novel than his previous others. DeLillo published the novel under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and later requested publishers compiling a bibliography for a reprint of a later novel to expunge the novel from their lists. While DeLillo was living in Greece, he took three years to write The Names (1982),
1740-419: A modern reinterpretation of James Joyce 's Ulysses transposed to New York around the time of the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000. The novel was met at the time with a largely negative reception from critics, with several high-profile critics and novelists—notably John Updike —voicing their objections to its style and tone. When asked in 2005 how he felt about the novel's mixed reception compared to
1856-401: A more "spare and oblique" style, characterized by "decreased length, the decommissioning of plot machinery and the steep deceleration of narrative time". DeLillo has said of this shift to shorter novels, "If a longer novel announces itself, I'll write it. A novel creates its own structure and develops its own terms. I tend to follow. And I never try to stretch what I sense is a compact book." In
1972-409: A network of networks. The Whole Earth movement of the 1960s advocated the use of new technology. In the 1970s, the home computer was introduced, time-sharing computers , the video game console , the first coin-op video games, and the golden age of arcade video games began with Space Invaders . As digital technology proliferated, and the switch from analog to digital record keeping became
2088-509: A novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can't be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it's true. DeLillo received two further significant literary awards in 2010:
2204-512: A novel, a short story, a long story. It was simply a piece of writing, and it gave me more pleasure than any other writing I've done. It turned into a novella, Pafko at the Wall , and it appeared in Harper's about a year after I started it. At some point I decided I wasn't finished with the piece. I was sending signals into space and getting echoes back, like a dolphin or a bat. So the piece, slightly altered,
2320-455: A personal computer. For households with children, nearly 30% owned a computer in 1989, and in 2000, 65% owned one. Cell phones became as ubiquitous as computers by the early 2000s, with movie theaters beginning to show ads telling people to silence their phones. They also became much more advanced than phones of the 1990s, most of which only took calls or at most allowed for the playing of simple games. Text messaging became widely used in
2436-496: A place in the canon of contemporary postmodern novelists. DeLillo remained as detached as ever from his growing reputation: when called upon to give an acceptance speech for the award, he simply said, "I'm sorry I couldn't be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming," and then sat down. White Noise' s influence can be seen in the writing of David Foster Wallace , Jonathan Lethem , Jonathan Franzen , Dave Eggers , Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to
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#17328518117462552-476: A publisher, to my astonishment. I didn't have a representative. I didn't know anything about publishing. But an editor at Houghton Mifflin read the manuscript and decided that this was worth pursuing." Americana was followed in rapid succession by the American college football/nuclear war black comedy End Zone (1972)—written under the working titles "The Self-Erasing Word" and "Modes of Disaster Technology"—and
2668-419: A sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this." He cites William Gaddis 's The Recognitions as a formative influence: "It was a revelation, a piece of writing with the beauty and texture of a Shakespearean monologue-or, maybe more apt, a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image into words. And they were the words of a contemporary American. This, to me,
2784-399: A single MOS chip by the late 1960s. The application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first microprocessors , as engineers began recognizing that a complete computer processor could be contained on a single MOS LSI chip. In 1968, Fairchild engineer Federico Faggin improved MOS technology with his development of the silicon-gate MOS chip, which he later used to develop
2900-403: A standard until the mid-2000s outside Japan. The World Wide Web became publicly accessible in 1991, which had been available only to government and universities. In 1993 Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina introduced Mosaic , the first web browser capable of displaying inline images and the basis for later browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Stanford Federal Credit Union
3016-404: A teenager, DeLillo was not interested in writing until he took a summer job as a parking attendant, where the hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a lifelong reading habit. Reflecting on this period, in a 2010 interview, he stated, "I had a personal golden age of reading in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time". Among the writers DeLillo read and
3132-467: A thriller about a hunt for a celluloid reel of Hitler's sexual exploits. Of Running Dog , DeLillo remarked, "What I was really getting at in Running Dog was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don't care about this so much anyway. This
3248-434: A very minimal kind of way. My telephone would be $ 4.20 every month. I was paying a rent of sixty dollars a month. And I was becoming a writer. So in one sense, I was ignoring the movements of the time." His first novel, Americana , was written over four years and finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. It concerned "a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture". DeLillo revised
3364-536: A whole, remarking in 2005, "November 22nd, 1963, marked the real beginning of the 1960s. It was the beginning of a series of catastrophes: political assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the denial of Civil Rights and the revolts that occasioned, youth revolt in American cities, right up to Watergate. When I was starting out as a writer it seemed to me that a large part of the material you could find in my novels—this sense of fatality, of widespread suspicion, of mistrust—came from
3480-480: Is now the prologue to a novel-in-progress, which will have a different title. And the pleasure has long since faded into the slogging reality of the no man's land of the long novel. But I'm still hearing the echoes." This would become the prologue of his epic Cold War history Underworld . DeLillo took inspiration from the October 4, 1951, front page of The New York Times , which juxtaposed Thomson's home-run alongside
3596-512: Is open to the idea of returning to the form of the long novel, the interview also revealed that he had no interest in doing as many of his literary contemporaries have done and writing a memoir. DeLillo also made some observations on the state of literature and the challenges facing young writers: It's tougher to be a young writer today than when I was a young writer. I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It
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3712-421: Is the informational equivalent to less than one 730- megabyte (MB) CD-ROM per person in 1986 (539 MB per person); roughly four CD-ROM per person in 1993; twelve CD-ROM per person in the year 2000; and almost sixty-one CD-ROM per person in 2007. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has reached 5 zettabytes in 2014, the informational equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books from
3828-563: The Deltar for water management in the Netherlands, network analyzers for electrical systems, and various machines for aiming military guns and bombs. The construction of problem-specific analog computers continued in the late 1940s and beyond, with FERMIAC for neutron transport, Project Cyclone for various military applications, and the Phillips Machine for economic modeling. Building on
3944-524: The Intel 4004 , the first single-chip microprocessor. It was released by Intel in 1971, and laid the foundations for the microcomputer revolution that began in the 1970s. MOS technology also led to the development of semiconductor image sensors suitable for digital cameras . The first such image sensor was the charge-coupled device , developed by Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith at Bell Labs in 1969, based on MOS capacitor technology. The public
4060-563: The LEO being the first commercially available general-purpose computer. Digital communication became economical for widespread adoption after the invention of the personal computer in the 1970s. Claude Shannon , a Bell Labs mathematician, is credited for having laid out the foundations of digitalization in his pioneering 1948 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication . In 1948, Bardeen and Brattain patented an insulated-gate transistor (IGFET) with an inversion layer. Their concept, forms
4176-654: The National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra , a novel about the assassination of John F. Kennedy . DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II , about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld , a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He
4292-593: The Netherlands became the first countries to completely transition from analog to digital television . In September 2007, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having broadband internet at home. According to estimates from the Nielsen Media Research , approximately 45.7 million U.S. households in 2006 (or approximately 40 percent of approximately 114.4 million) owned a dedicated home video game console , and by 2015, 51 percent of U.S. households owned
4408-583: The PEN/Faulkner Award in 1992. Following Mao II , DeLillo went underground and spent several years writing and researching his 11th novel. In 1992, he published the folio short story " Pafko at the Wall " in Harper's Magazine . The piece recounts Bobby Thomson 's Shot Heard 'Round the World from the perspective of various witnesses, real and fictional. He told The Paris Review , "Sometime in late 1991, I started writing something new and didn't know what it would be –
4524-857: The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York . It is a member of the Catholic High School Athletic Association . The building was constructed in the Art Deco style. It is named after Cardinal Patrick Joseph Hayes , a previous archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. Cardinal Hayes was dedicated on September 8, 1941, by Archbishop Spellman . Cardinal Hayes' current rival is Mount Saint Michael Academy . The two schools' football teams have met annually since 1942 on Thanksgiving Day. Cardinal Hayes also takes part in non-annual football rivalries with Cardinal Spellman High School and Archbishop Stepinac High School for
4640-627: The St. Louis Literary Award on October 21, 2010 (previous recipients include Salman Rushdie , E.L. Doctorow , John Updike , William Gass , Joyce Carol Oates , Joan Didion and Tennessee Williams ); and his second PEN Award , the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction , on October 13, 2010. DeLillo's first collection of short stories, The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories , covering short stories published between 1979 and 2011,
4756-467: The T-carrier for long-haul pulse-code modulation (PCM) digital voice transmission. The T1 format carried 24 pulse-code modulated, time-division multiplexed speech signals each encoded in 64 kbit/s streams, leaving 8 kbit/s of framing information which facilitated the synchronization and demultiplexing at the receiver. Over the subsequent decades the digitisation of voice became the norm for all but
Don DeLillo - Misplaced Pages Continue
4872-401: The digital technology that would follow decades later to replace analog microform with digital imaging , storage , and transmission media , whereby vast increases in the rapidity of information growth would be made possible through automated , potentially- lossless digital technologies. Accordingly, Moore's law , formulated around 1965, would calculate that the number of transistors in
4988-567: The earth to the sun . The amount of digital data stored appears to be growing approximately exponentially , reminiscent of Moore's law . As such, Kryder's law prescribes that the amount of storage space available appears to be growing approximately exponentially. The world's technological capacity to receive information through one-way broadcast networks was 432 exabytes of (optimally compressed ) information in 1986; 715 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1993; 1.2 (optimally compressed) zettabytes in 2000; and 1.9 zettabytes in 2007,
5104-476: The information revolution . Now that sequencing has been computerized, genome can be rendered and manipulated as data. This started with DNA sequencing , invented by Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam in 1976-1977 and Frederick Sanger in 1977, grew steadily with the Human Genome Project , initially conceived by Gilbert and finally, the practical applications of sequencing, such as gene testing , after
5220-474: The journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution in 2016 reported that: Digital technology has vastly exceeded the cognitive capacity of any single human being and has done so a decade earlier than predicted. In terms of capacity, there are two measures of importance: the number of operations a system can perform and the amount of information that can be stored. The number of synaptic operations per second in
5336-419: The planar process developed by Jean Hoerni . In 1963, complementary MOS (CMOS) was developed by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass at Fairchild Semiconductor . The self-aligned gate transistor, which further facilitated mass production, was invented in 1966 by Robert Bower at Hughes Aircraft and independently by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs. In 1962 AT&T deployed
5452-529: The slide rule and mechanical calculators . By the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had produced mass-market calculators like the arithmometer and the enabling technology of the punch card . Charles Babbage proposed a mechanical general-purpose computer called the Analytical Engine , but it was never successfully built, and was largely forgotten by the 20th century and unknown to most of
5568-519: The '70s came the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: Kubrick , Altman , Coppola , Scorsese and so on. I don't know how they may have affected the way I write, but I do have a visual sense." Of the influence of film, particularly European cinema, on his work, DeLillo has said, "European and Asian cinemas of the 1960s shaped the way I think and feel about things. At that time I
5684-580: The 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy . DeLillo undertook a vast research project, which included reading at least half of the Warren Commission report (which DeLillo called "the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel. This is the one document that captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event, despite the fact that it omits about a ton and
5800-564: The 1980s and 1990s, but I've always preferred to be somewhere in the corner of a room, observing." On July 24, 2009, Entertainment Weekly announced that David Cronenberg would adapt Cosmopolis for the screen, with "a view to eventually direct." Cosmopolis , eventually released in 2012, became the first direct adaptation for the screen of a DeLillo novel, although both Libra and Underworld had previously been optioned for screen treatments. There were discussions about adapting End Zone , and DeLillo has written an original screenplay for
5916-407: The 1980s the digital format of optical compact discs gradually replaced analog formats, such as vinyl records and cassette tapes , as the popular medium of choice. Humans have manufactured tools for counting and calculating since ancient times, such as the abacus , astrolabe , equatorium , and mechanical timekeeping devices. More complicated devices started appearing in the 1600s, including
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#17328518117466032-528: The 1990s, the spread of the Internet caused a sudden leap in access to and ability to share information in businesses and homes globally. A computer that cost $ 3000 in 1997 would cost $ 2000 two years later and $ 1000 the following year, due to the rapid advancement of technology. The world's technological capacity to compute information with human-guided general-purpose computers grew from 3.0 × 10 MIPS in 1986, to 4.4 × 10 MIPS in 1993; to 2.9 × 10 MIPS in 2000; to 6.4 × 10 MIPS in 2007. An article featured in
6148-556: The 2012 Carl Sandburg Literary Award on October 17, 2012, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago . The prize is "presented annually to an acclaimed author in recognition of outstanding contributions to the literary world and honors a significant work or body of work that has enhanced the public's awareness of the written word." On January 29, 2013, Variety announced that Luca Guadagnino would direct an adaptation of The Body Artist called Body Art . On April 26, 2013, it
6264-550: The 25th anniversary edition of the novel). Among the 39 proposed titles for the novel were "All Souls", "Ultrasonic", "The American Book of the Dead", "Psychic Data" and "Mein Kampf". In 2005 DeLillo said "White Noise" was a fine choice, adding, "Once a title is affixed to a book, it becomes as indelible as a sentence or a paragraph." DeLillo followed White Noise with Libra (1988), a speculative fictionalized life of Lee Harvey Oswald up to
6380-514: The Bronx, DeLillo said he was "always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English." As
6496-514: The Jesuit thinker and paleontologist [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin." The Omega Point of the title "[is] the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable." Point Omega is DeLillo's shortest novel to date, and he has said it could be considered a companion piece to The Body Artist : "In its reflections on time and loss, this may be
6612-523: The Looking Glass —took two years to write and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon . This "conceptual monster", as DeLillo scholar Tom LeClair has called it, is "the picaresque story of a 14-year-old math genius who joins an international consortium of mad scientists decoding an alien message." DeLillo has said it was both one of the most difficult books for him to write and his personal favorite. Following this early attempt at
6728-801: The National Book Award and The New York Times Best Books of the Year in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998. The novel won the 1998 American Book Award and the William Dean Howells Medal in 2000. DeLillo later expressed surprise at Underworld' s success. In 2007, he remarked: "When I finished with Underworld , I didn't really have any all-too-great hopes, to be honest. It's some pretty complicated stuff: 800 pages, more than 100 different characters—who's going to be interested in that?" After rereading it in 2010, over ten years after its publication, DeLillo said that rereading it "made me wonder whether I would be capable of that kind of writing now—the range and scope of it. There are certain parts of
6844-474: The Ransom Center, DeLillo has said: "I ran out of space and also felt, as one does at a certain age, that I was running out of time. I didn't want to leave behind an enormous mess of papers for family members to deal with. Of course, I've since produced more paper—novel, play, essay, etc.—and so the cycle begins again." DeLillo published his final novel of the decade, Falling Man , in 2007. The novel concerns
6960-641: The Scientific Age and the Industrial Age all, ultimately, induced discontinuous and irreversible changes in the economic, social and cultural elements of the daily life of most people. Traditionally, these epochs have taken place over hundreds, or in the case of the Neolithic Revolution, thousands of years, whereas the Information Age swept to all parts of the globe in just a few years, as a result of
7076-404: The United States; their first survey showed that 8.2% of all U.S. households owned a personal computer in 1984, and that households with children under the age of 18 were nearly twice as likely to own one at 15.3% (middle and upper middle class households were the most likely to own one, at 22.9%). By 1989, 15% of all U.S. households owned a computer, and nearly 30% of households with children under
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#17328518117467192-454: The age of 18 owned one. By the late 1980s, many businesses were dependent on computers and digital technology. Motorola created the first mobile phone, Motorola DynaTac , in 1983. However, this device used analog communication - digital cell phones were not sold commercially until 1991 when the 2G network started to be opened in Finland to accommodate the unexpected demand for cell phones that
7308-401: The art but for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something about the American experience." In a statement issued in response to the award, DeLillo said, "When I received news of this award, my first thoughts were of my mother and father, who came to this country
7424-453: The assassination of JFK." DeLillo's concerns about the position of the novelist and the novel in a media- and terrorist-dominated society were made clear in his next novel, Mao II (1991). Influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed on Salman Rushdie and the intrusion of the press into the life of J. D. Salinger , Mao II earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, John Banville and Thomas Pynchon . It won
7540-470: The basis of CMOS and DRAM technology today. In 1957 at Bell Labs, Frosch and Derick were able to manufacture planar silicon dioxide transistors, later a team at Bell Labs demonstrated a working MOSFET. The first integrated circuit milestone was achieved by Jack Kilby in 1958. Other important technological developments included the invention of the monolithic integrated circuit chip by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, made possible by
7656-530: The beginning of his writing career, DeLillo has said, "I did some short stories at that time but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore." Reflecting in 1993 on his relatively late start in writing novels, DeLillo said, "I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn't ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn't have
7772-405: The book an affront to America and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship". DeLillo responded "I don't take it seriously, but being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what
7888-547: The book where the exuberance, the extravagance, I don't know, the overindulgence....There are city scenes in New York that seem to transcend reality in a certain way." Although they have received some acclaim in places, DeLillo's post- Underworld novels have been often viewed by critics as "disappointing and slight, especially when held up against his earlier, big-canvas epics", marking a shift "away from sweeping, era-defining novels" such as White Noise , Libra and Underworld to
8004-506: The broader positive consensus afforded to Underworld , DeLillo remarked: "I try to stay detached from that aspect of my work as a writer. I didn't read any reviews or articles. Maybe it [the negative reception] was connected to September 11 . I'd almost finished writing the book when the attacks took place, and so they couldn't have had any influence on the book's conception, nor on its writing. Perhaps for certain readers this upset their expectations." Critical opinions have since been revised,
8120-488: The complexity of the Z1 and Z2 , German inventor Konrad Zuse used electromechanical systems to complete in 1941 the Z3 , the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. Also during World War II, Allied engineers constructed electromechanical bombes to break German Enigma machine encoding. The base-10 electromechanical Harvard Mark I was completed in 1944, and
8236-440: The corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job." In the same interview DeLillo rejected Will's claim that DeLillo blames America for Lee Harvey Oswald, countering that he instead blamed America for George Will. DeLillo has frequently reflected on the significance of the Kennedy assassination to not only his own work but American culture and history as
8352-518: The development of the transistor in 1947 and the optical amplifier in 1957. These technological advances have had a significant impact on the way information is processed and transmitted. According to the United Nations Public Administration Network , the Information Age was formed by capitalizing on computer miniaturization advances, which led to modernized information systems and internet communications as
8468-822: The discovery by Myriad Genetics of the BRCA1 breast cancer gene mutation. Sequence data in Genbank has grown from the 606 genome sequences registered in December 1982 to the 231 million genomes in August 2021. An additional 13 trillion incomplete sequences are registered in the Whole Genome Shotgun submission database as of August 2021. The information contained in these registered sequences has doubled every 18 months. During rare times in human history, there have been periods of innovation that have transformed human life. The Neolithic Age ,
8584-731: The driving force of social evolution . There is ongoing debate concerning whether the Third Industrial Revolution has already ended and if the Fourth Industrial Revolution has already begun due to the recent breakthroughs in areas such as artificial intelligence and biotechnologies. This next transition has been theorized to harken the advent of the Imagination Age . The digital revolution converted technology from analog format to digital format. By doing this, it became possible to make copies that were identical to
8700-453: The extended version of the list during its one-week stay on the list. In a January 29, 2010, interview with The Wall Street Journal , DeLillo discussed at great length Point Omega , his views of writing, and his plans for the future. When asked why his recent novels had been shorter, DeLillo replied, "Each book tells me what it wants or what it is, and I'd be perfectly content to write another long novel. It just has to happen." While DeLillo
8816-559: The film Game 6 . DeLillo ended the decade by making an unexpected appearance at a PEN event on the steps of the New York Public Library in support of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo , who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" on December 31, 2009. DeLillo published Point Omega , his 15th novel, in February 2010. According to DeLillo, the novel considers an idea from "the writing of
8932-408: The following year. In 2002, a majority of U.S. survey respondents reported having a mobile phone . In late 2005 the population of the Internet reached 1 billion, and 3 billion people worldwide used cell phones by the end of the decade. HDTV became the standard television broadcasting format in many countries by the end of the decade. In September and December 2006 respectively, Luxembourg and
9048-611: The groundwork for the advent of civilization. The Scientific Age began in the period between Galileo 's 1543 proof that the planets orbit the Sun and Newton 's publication of the laws of motion and gravity in Principia in 1697. This age of discovery continued through the 18th century, accelerated by widespread use of the moveable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg . The Industrial Age began in Great Britain in 1760 and continued into
9164-511: The hard way, as young people confronting a new language and culture. In a significant sense, the Library of Congress Prize is the culmination of their efforts and a tribute to their memory." In November 2012, DeLillo revealed that he was at work on a new novel, his 16th, and that "the [main] character spends a lot of time watching file footage on a wide screen, images of a disaster." In August 2015, DeLillo's publisher Simon & Schuster announced that
9280-589: The impact on one family of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, "an intimate story which is encompassed by a global event". DeLillo said he originally "didn't ever want to write a novel about 9/11" and "had an idea for a different book" he had "been working on for half a year" in 2004 when he came up with the idea for the novel, beginning work on it following the reelection of George W. Bush that November. Although highly anticipated and eagerly awaited by critics, who felt that DeLillo
9396-426: The information equivalent of 174 newspapers per person per day. The world's effective capacity to exchange information through two-way Telecommunications networks was 281 petabytes of (optimally compressed) information in 1986; 471 petabytes in 1993; 2.2 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2000; and 65 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 2007, the information equivalent of six newspapers per person per day. In
9512-609: The inventors of modern computers. The Second Industrial Revolution in the last quarter of the 19th century developed useful electrical circuits and the telegraph . In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith developed electromechanical tabulating and calculating devices using punch cards and unit record equipment , which became widespread in business and government. Meanwhile, various analog computer systems used electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic systems to model problems and calculate answers. These included an 1872 tide-predicting machine , differential analysers , perpetual calendar machines,
9628-440: The last mile (where analogue continued to be the norm right into the late 1990s). Following the development of MOS integrated circuit chips in the early 1960s, MOS chips reached higher transistor density and lower manufacturing costs than bipolar integrated circuits by 1964. MOS chips further increased in complexity at a rate predicted by Moore's law , leading to large-scale integration (LSI) with hundreds of transistors on
9744-700: The late 1980s, less than 1% of the world's technologically stored information was in digital format, while it was 94% in 2007, with more than 99% by 2014. It is estimated that the world's capacity to store information has increased from 2.6 (optimally compressed) exabytes in 1986, to some 5,000 exabytes in 2014 (5 zettabytes ). Library expansion was calculated in 1945 by Fremont Rider to double in capacity every 16 years where sufficient space made available. He advocated replacing bulky, decaying printed works with miniaturized microform analog photographs , which could be duplicated on-demand for library patrons and other institutions. Rider did not foresee, however,
9860-515: The late 1990s worldwide, except for in the United States of America where text messaging didn't become commonplace till the early 2000s. The digital revolution became truly global in this time as well - after revolutionizing society in the developed world in the 1990s, the digital revolution spread to the masses in the developing world in the 2000s. By 2000, a majority of U.S. households had at least one personal computer and internet access
9976-409: The mid-19th century. The invention of machines such as the mechanical textile weaver by Edmund Cartwrite, the rotating shaft steam engine by James Watt and the cotton gin by Eli Whitney , along with processes for mass manufacturing, came to serve the needs of a growing global population. The Industrial Age harnessed steam and waterpower to reduce the dependence on animal and human physical labor as
10092-437: The narrower market. In a February 21, 2010, interview with The Times , DeLillo reaffirmed his belief in the validity and importance of the novel in a technology- and media-driven age, offering a more optimistic opinion of the future of the novel than his contemporary Philip Roth had done in a recent interview: It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience....For that reason, reading
10208-589: The new standard in business, a relatively new job description was popularized, the data entry clerk . Culled from the ranks of secretaries and typists from earlier decades, the data entry clerk's job was to convert analog data (customer records, invoices, etc.) into digital data. In developed nations, computers achieved semi-ubiquity during the 1980s as they made their way into schools, homes, business, and industry. Automated teller machines , industrial robots , CGI in film and television, electronic music , bulletin board systems , and video games all fueled what became
10324-502: The news that the Soviet Union had tested a hydrogen bomb . The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic Martin Amis saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer." Harold Bloom called it "the culmination of what Don can do." Underworld went on to become one of DeLillo's most acclaimed novels to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for
10440-440: The novel in 1989 for paperback reprinting. Reflecting on the novel later in his career, he said, "I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published." Later still, DeLillo continued to feel
10556-546: The novel latterly being seen as prescient for its focus on the flaws and weaknesses of the international financial system and cybercapital. DeLillo's papers were acquired in 2004 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin , reputedly for "half a million dollars". There are "[one] hundred and twenty-five boxes" of DeLillo materials, including various drafts and correspondence. Of his decision to donate his papers to
10672-478: The novel, Zero K , would be published in May 2016. The advanced blurb for the novel is as follows: Digital Age The Information Age is a historical period that began in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rapid shift from traditional industries, as established during the Industrial Revolution , to an economy centered on information technology . The onset of the Information Age has been linked to
10788-420: The original. In digital communications, for example, repeating hardware was able to amplify the digital signal and pass it on with no loss of information in the signal. Of equal importance to the revolution was the ability to easily move the digital information between media, and to access or distribute it remotely. One turning point of the revolution was the change from analog to digitally recorded music. During
10904-548: The primary means of production. Thus, the core of the Industrial Revolution was the generation and distribution of energy from coal and water to produce steam and, later in the 20th century, electricity. Cardinal Hayes High School Cardinal Hayes High School is an American Catholic high school for boys in the Concourse Village neighborhood of the Bronx , New York City , New York . The school serves
11020-1287: The rapidly advancing speed of information exchange. Between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago during the Neolithic period, humans began to domesticate animals, began to farm grains and to replace stone tools with ones made of metal. These innovations allowed nomadic hunter-gatherers to settle down. Villages formed along the Yangtze River in China in 6,500 B.C., the Nile River region of Africa and in Mesopotamia ( Iraq ) in 6,000 B.C. Cities emerged between 6,000 B.C. and 3,500 B.C. The development of written communication ( cuneiform in Sumeria and hieroglyphs in Egypt in 3,500 B.C. and writing in Egypt in 2,560 B.C. and in Minoa and China around 1,450 B.C.) enabled ideas to be preserved for extended periods to spread extensively. In all, Neolithic developments, augmented by writing as an information tool, laid
11136-513: The rock and roll satire Great Jones Street (1973), which DeLillo later felt was "one of the books I wish I'd done differently. It should be tighter, and probably a little funnier." He married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned landscape designer, in 1975. DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976)—which according to DeLillo is "structure[d] [...] on the writings of Lewis Carroll , in particular Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through
11252-433: The spotlight to write his 12th novel, surfacing with The Body Artist in 2001. The novel has many established DeLillo preoccupations, particularly its interest in performance art and domestic privacies in relation to the wider scope of events. But it is very different in style and tone from the epic history of Underworld , and met with mixed critical reception. DeLillo followed The Body Artist with 2003's Cosmopolis ,
11368-461: The whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us." DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in New York City and grew up in an Italian Catholic family with ties to Molise , Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx not far from Arthur Avenue . Reflecting on his childhood in
11484-473: The zeitgeist of the 1980s. Millions of people purchased home computers, making household names of early personal computer manufacturers such as Apple , Commodore, and Tandy. To this day the Commodore 64 is often cited as the best selling computer of all time, having sold 17 million units (by some accounts) between 1982 and 1994. In 1984, the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting data on computer and Internet use in
11600-610: Was also invented in the late 1980s. Disney's CAPS system (created 1988) was used for a scene in 1989's The Little Mermaid and for all their animation films between 1990's The Rescuers Down Under and 2004's Home on the Range . Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. The first public digital HDTV broadcast was of the 1990 World Cup that June; it was played in 10 theaters in Spain and Italy. However, HDTV did not become
11716-469: Was an enormous challenge for me and probably a bigger challenge for the reader. But I slowed down in the 1980s and '90s." DeLillo has also acknowledged some of the weaknesses of his 1970s works, reflecting in 2007: "I knew I wasn't doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way." The beginning of the 1980s saw the most unusual and uncharacteristic publication in DeLillo's career. The sports novel Amazons ,
11832-403: Was announced that DeLillo had received the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (formerly the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for Fiction), with the presentation of the award due to take place during the 2013 National Book Festival , Sept. 21–22, 2013. The prize honors "an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of
11948-407: Was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize , the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction , and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction . DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture". In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and
12064-482: Was becoming apparent in the late 1980s. Compute! magazine predicted that CD-ROM would be the centerpiece of the revolution, with multiple household devices reading the discs. The first true digital camera was created in 1988, and the first were marketed in December 1989 in Japan and in 1990 in the United States. By the early 2000s, digital cameras had eclipsed traditional film in popularity. Digital ink and paint
12180-405: Was doing more closely. I don't have regrets about that work, but I do think that if I had been a bit less hasty in starting each new book, I might have produced somewhat better work in the 1970s. My first novel took so long and was such an effort that once I was free of it, I almost became carefree in a sense and moved right through the decade, stopping, in a way, only at Ratner's Star (1976), which
12296-495: Was first introduced to the concepts that led to the Internet when a message was sent over the ARPANET in 1969. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, Mark I , CYCLADES , Merit Network , Tymnet , and Telenet , were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols . The ARPANET in particular led to the development of protocols for internetworking , in which multiple separate networks could be joined into
12412-438: Was in Greece in 1979. On that occasion, DeLillo handed LeClair a business card with his name printed on it and beneath that the message "I don't want to talk about it." With the 1985 publication of his eighth novel, White Noise , DeLillo rapidly became a noted and respected novelist. White Noise was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award for Fiction and
12528-454: Was inspired by in this period were James Joyce , William Faulkner , Flannery O'Connor , and Ernest Hemingway , who was a major influence on DeLillo's earliest attempts at writing in his late teens. As well as the influence of modernist fiction, DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music—"guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis "—and postwar cinema: " Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut , and then in
12644-495: Was living in New York, I didn't have much money, didn't have much work, I was living in one room...I was a man in a small room. And I went to the movies a lot, watching Bergman, Antonioni, Godard. When I was little, in the Bronx, I didn't go to the cinema, and I didn't think of the American films I saw as works of art. Perhaps, in an indirect way, cinema allowed me to become a writer." He also credits his parents' leniency and acceptance of his desire to write for encouraging him to pursue
12760-516: Was one of the contemporary writers best equipped to tackle the events of 9/11 in novelistic form, the novel met with a mixed critical reception and garnered no major literary awards or nominations. DeLillo remained unconcerned by this relative lack of critical acclaim, remarking in 2010, "In the 1970s, when I started writing novels, I was a figure in the margins, and that's where I belonged. If I'm headed back that way, that's fine with me because that's always where I felt I belonged. Things changed for me in
12876-542: Was published in November 2011. It received favorable reviews and was a finalist for both the 2012 Story Prize award and the 2012 PEN/Faulkner , as well as being longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award . New York Times Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger praised it, saying, "DeLillo packs fertile ruminations and potent consolation into each of these rich, dense, concentrated stories." DeLillo received
12992-570: Was something I felt characterized our lives at the time the book was written in the mid to late seventies. I think this was part of American consciousness then." In 1978, DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship , which he used to fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Greece, where he wrote his next novels, Amazons and The Names . Of his first six novels and his rapid writing turnover later in his career, DeLillo said, "I wasn't learning to slow down and examine what I
13108-455: Was the first financial institution to offer online internet banking services to all of its members in October 1994. In 1996 OP Financial Group , also a cooperative bank , became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. The Internet expanded quickly, and by 1996, it was part of mass culture and many businesses listed websites in their ads. By 1999, almost every country had
13224-520: Was the wonder of it." DeLillo's inaugural decade of novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing and publication of six novels between 1971 and 1978. DeLillo resigned from the advertising industry in 1964, moved into a modest apartment near the Queens–Midtown Tunnel ("It wasn't Paris in the 1920s, but I was happy"), and began work on his first novel. Of the early days of his writing career, he remarked: "I lived in
13340-527: Was to some degree improved with inspiration from Charles Babbage's designs. In 1947, the first working transistor , the germanium -based point-contact transistor , was invented by John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs . This led the way to more advanced digital computers . From the late 1940s, universities, military, and businesses developed computer systems to digitally replicate and automate previously manually performed mathematical calculations, with
13456-461: Was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published. I don't think publishers have that kind of tolerance these days, and I guess possibly as a result, more writers go to writing class now than then. I think first, fiction, and second, novels, are much more refined in terms of language, but they may tend to be too well behaved, almost in response to
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