name	Don DeLillo
birth date	November 20, 1936
birth place	New York City
occupation	Novelist
notableworks	White Noise, Libra, Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man
movement	Postmodern
nationality	United States
influences	Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, William Gaddis, Malcolm Lowry, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, John Dos Passos, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, Saul Bellow, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, Flannery O'Connor
influenced	Bret Easton Ellis, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Chuck Palahniuk, Jonathan Lethem, David Mitchell
website	}}

Don DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American author, playwright, and occasional essayist whose work paints a detailed portrait of American life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. DeLillo's novels have tackled subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, and global terrorism. He currently lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville.

Early life

DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family (like Jimmy in Underworld, "near town called Campobasso, in the mountains, where boys were raised to sharpen knives") in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, not far from Arthur Avenue. Reflecting on his childhood in The Bronx, DeLillo later described how 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 a teenager, DeLillo wasn't interested in writing until taking a summer job as a parking attendant, where hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a reading habit. In a 2010 interview with The Australian, DeLillo reflected on this period by saying "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 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.

After graduating from Fordham University in the Bronx with a bachelor's degree in Communication Arts in 1958, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he couldn't get one in publishing. He worked for five years as a copywriter at the agency of Ogilvy & Mather on Fifth Avenue at East 48th Street, 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, "The River Jordan", in Epoch, the literary magazine of Cornell University, in 1960 and began to work on his first novel in 1966. Discussing the beginning of his writing career, DeLillo 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 on his relatively late start in writing fiction in 1993, 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 a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this."

Novels of the 1970s

DeLillo's inaugural decade of novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing and publication of six novels in eight years between 1971-1978.

After he quit the advertising industry in 1964, DeLillo began to write his first novel. He later reflected: "...I lived in 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." DeLillo's first novel, Americana, was written over the course of four years and finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. Americana concerned "a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture". This novel was later revised by DeLillo in 1989 for paperback re-printing. Reflecting on the novel later in his career, DeLillo admitted "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."

Americana was followed in rapid succession by the American college football/nuclear war black comedy End Zone (1972) and 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." In 1975, he married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned landscape designer.

DeLillo's fourth novel, Ratner's Star (1976), took two years to write and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon. This "conceptual monster", as DeLillo scholar Tom LeClair describes it, is "the picaresque story of a 14-year-old math genius who joins an international consortium of mad scientists decoding an alien message." and has been cited by DeLillo as both one of the most difficult books to write and his personal favorite of his own novels.

Following this early attempt at a major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. Players (1977) concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as they get involved with a cell of domestic terrorists, and Running Dog (1978), written in a brief four month streak, was a thriller concerning numerous individuals hunting down a celluloid reel of Hitler's sexual exploits.

In 1978, DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Turkey.

Reflecting on his first six novels and his rapid writing turnover later in his career, DeLillo remarked, "I wasn't learning to slow down and examine what I 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 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."

Novels of the 1980s

The beginning of the 1980s saw the most unusual and uncharacteristic publication in DeLillo's career. The sports novel Amazons, a mock memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, is a far more light hearted and more evidently commercial novel than his previous and subsequent novels. 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 spent several years living in Greece, he took three years to write The Names (1982), a complex thriller concerning "a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East". While lauded by an increasing number of literary critics, DeLillo was still relatively unknown outside of 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 was in Greece in 1979 (on that occasion, DeLillo had 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 publication of his eighth novel White Noise in 1985, DeLillo began a rapid ascendancy to being a noted and respected novelist. White Noise was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award and a place among the academic 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. The influence and impact of White Noise can be seen in the writing of such authors as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to the 25th Anniversary edition of the novel).

DeLillo followed White Noise with Libra (1988), a speculative fictionalised take on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald up to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. For this novel DeLillo undertook a vast research project, which included reading at least half of the Warren Commission (subsequently DeLillo described as "...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 a half of material.") Originally written with the working title of either "American Blood" or "Texas School Book," Libra became an international bestseller, earned DeLillo another nomination for the National Book Award, and won the Irish Times Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize the following year. 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 a Washington Post article, declared the book to be an affront to America and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship."

Novels of the 1990s

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). Clearly influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed upon the author Salman Rushdie and the intrusion of the press into the life of the reclusive writer JD Salinger, Mao II earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, fellow authors John Banville and Thomas Pynchon. He earned a PEN/Faulkner Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist nomination for Mao II in 1991 and 1992, respectively.

Following Mao II, DeLillo went to ground and spent several years writing and researching his eleventh novel. Aside from the publication of a folio short story entitled 'Pafko at the Wall' in a 1992 edition of Harpers Magazine, and one short story in 1995, little was seen or heard of him for a number of years.

In 1997, DeLillo finally broke cover with his long awaited eleventh novel, the epic Cold War history Underworld. The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic Martin Amis saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer." Underworld went on to become DeLillo's most acclaimed novel to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book Award, the New York Times Best Books of the Year award in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998. The novel went on to win the 1998 American Book Award, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, and both the William Dean Howells Medal and "Riccardo Bacchelli" International Award in 2000. It was a runner-up in The New York Times' survey of the best American fiction of the last 25 years (announced in May, 2006). White Noise and Libra were also recognized by the anonymous jury of contemporary writers.

DeLillo has subsequently expressed surprise at the success of the novel. In 2007, he candidly 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 re-reading it again in 2010, over ten years after its publication, DeLillo commented that re-reading 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 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.”

Novels of the 2000s

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 a more "spare and oblique" style. DeLillo has commented on this shift to shorter novels, saying "“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 a March 2010 interview, it was reported that DeLillo's deliberate stylistic shift had been informed by his having recently re-read 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 the spotlight to write his twelfth novel, surfacing with The Body Artist in 2001. The novel contained many established DeLillo preoccupations, particularly its interest in performance art and domestic privacies in relation to the wider scope of events. However, the slight and brief novella was very different in style and tone to the epic history of Underworld, and met with a mixed critical reception.

DeLillo followed The Body Artist with 2003's Cosmopolis, a modern re-interpretation of James Joyce's Ulysses transposed to New York around the time of the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the year 2000. This 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 the novel's style and tone. However, subsequently critical opinions have been revised, the novel latterly being seen as prescient for its views 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.

DeLillo returned with what would turn out to be his final novel of the decade with Falling Man in May, 2007. The novel concerned 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." According to a 2007 interview in Die Zeit, DeLillo claims that originally he "...didn't ever want to write a novel about 9/11." and "...had an idea for a different book" which he had "been working on for half a year" in 2004 when he came up with an idea for the novel, beginning work on the novel following the re-election of George W. Bush that November. Although highly anticipated and eagerly awaited by critics, who felt that DeLillo was one of the contemporary writers best equipped to tackle with the events of 9/11 in novelistic form, the novel met once again with a mixed critical reception and garnered no major literary awards or nominations. DeLillo, however, 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 the 1980s and 1990s, but I’ve always preferred to be somewhere in the corner of a room, observing.”

On April 25, 2009 DeLillo received another significant literary award, the 2009 Common Wealth Award for Literature, given by PNC Bank of Delaware.

On June 9, 2009 it was announced that DeLillo's next novel, his fifteenth, had been completed and was set for publication. Titled Point Omega, the brief plot description released revealed that the new short novel concerns: "A young filmmaker [who] visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man's daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn." The first confirmed extract from Point Omega was made available on the Simon and Schuster website on December 10, 2009.

On July 24, 2009, Entertainment Weekly announced:

Director David Cronenberg (A History of Violence, Naked Lunch) will write a screenplay adaptation of Don DeLillo's 2003 novel Cosmopolis, with "a view to eventually direct,"

This would be the first direct adaptation for the screen of a DeLillo novel, although both Libra and Underworld have previously been optioned for screen treatments and DeLillo himself has written an original screenplay for the film Game 6. On January 13, 2010, The Canadian Press revealed the latest update on the adaptation:

Cronenberg...said he's finished writing the big-screen adaptation of Don DeLillo's provocative 2003 novel "Cosmopolis."

"Everyone's happy with the script," he said, noting they haven't cast it yet.

"It's a project I'm very fond of," added Cronenberg. "It's a terrific book and plans are in the works to make that movie.

On November 30, 2009, DeLillo published a new original short story in the New Yorker magazine, his first since "Still Life" in 2007 prior to the release of Falling Man. The new story is called "Midnight in Dostoevsky" and it is a standalone short story (not a part of DeLillo's novel Point Omega as seen in the advance copies).

DeLillo ended the decade by making an unexpected appearance at a PEN event on the steps of the New York City Public Library, 5th Ave and 42nd St in support of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to eleven years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" on December 31, 2009.

Novels of the 2010s

DeLillo published Point Omega, his fifteenth novel, in February 2010. According to DeLillo, the novel considers an idea from "...the writing of 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." Reviews thus far have been incredibly polarised, with some saying the novel is a return to form and innovative, while others have complained about the novel's brevity and apparent lack of plot and engaging characters. Upon its initial release, Point Omega spent one week on the New York Times Bestseller List, peaking at #35 on 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 Point Omega, his views of writing and his plans for the future at great length. When asked about 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 is open to the idea of returning to the form of the long novel, the interview also revealed that he currently has 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 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 the narrower market."

However, in a February 21, 2010 interview with The Times newspaper, DeLillo re-affirmed 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 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 is set to receive the St. Louis Literary Award for his entire body of work to date on October 21, 2010. Previous recipients include Salman Rushdie, E.L. Doctorow, John Updike, William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion and Tennessee Williams.

Plays

Since 1979, in addition to his novels and occasional essays, DeLillo has been active as a playwright. To date, DeLillo has written five major plays: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (1986), Valparaiso (1999), Love Lies Bleeding (2006), and, most recently, The Word For Snow (2007). Stage adaptations have also been written for DeLillo's novel's Libra and Mao II.

Themes and criticism

DeLillo is widely considered by modern critics to be one of the central figures of literary postmodernism. He has said the primary influences on his work and development are "abstract expressionism, foreign films, and jazz." Many of DeLillo's books (notably White Noise) satirize academia and explore postmodern themes of rampant consumerism, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence. In several of his novels, DeLillo explores the idea of the increasing visibility and effectiveness of terrorists as societal actors and, consequently, the displacement of what he views to be artists', and particularly novelists', traditional role in facilitating social discourse (Players, Mao II, Falling Man). Another perpetual theme in DeLillo's books is the saturation of mass media and its role in forming simulacra which serve to remove an event from its context and alter or drain its inherent meaning (see the highway shooter in Underworld, the televised disasters longed for in White Noise, the planes in Falling Man, the evolving story of the interviewee in Valparaiso). The psychology of crowds and the capitulation of individuals to group identity is a theme DeLillo examines in several of his novels, especially in the prologue to Underworld, Mao II, and Falling Man. In a 1993 interview with Maria Nadotti, DeLillo explained

Many younger English-language authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace have cited DeLillo as an influence. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy, though he questions the classification of DeLillo as a "postmodern novelist." Asked if he approves of this designation, DeLillo has responded: "I don't react. But I'd prefer not to be labeled. I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist."

Critics of DeLillo allege that his novels are overly stylized and intellectually shallow. Bruce Bawer famously condemned DeLillo's novels insisting they weren't actually novels at all but "tracts, designed to batter us, again and again, with a single idea: that life in America today is boring, benumbing, dehumanized...It's better, DeLillo seems to say in one novel after another, to be a marauding murderous maniac—and therefore a human—than to sit still for America as it is, with its air conditioners, assembly lines, television sets, supermarkets, synthetic fabrics, and credit cards." George Will proclaimed the study of Lee Harvey Oswald in Libra as "sandbox existentialism" 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 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 also figured prominently in B. R. Myers' critique of recent American literary fiction, A Reader's Manifesto.

Works

Novels

Americana (1971)

End Zone (1972)

Great Jones Street (1973)

Ratner's Star (1976)

Players (1977)

Running Dog (1978)

Amazons (1980) (under pseudonym "Cleo Birdwell")

The Names (1982)

White Noise (1985)

Libra (1988)

Mao II (1991)

Underworld (1997) (see also Pafko at the Wall, the prologue of Underworld which was published separately in Harper's in Oct. 1992)

The Body Artist (2001)

Cosmopolis (2003)

Falling Man (2007)

Point Omega (2010)

Short stories

"The River Jordan" (1960) (First published in Epoch 10, No. 2 (Winter 1960), pp. 105–120.)

Take the "A" Train (1962) (First published in Epoch 12, No. 1 (Spring 1962) pp. 9–25.)

"Spaghetti and Meatballs" (1965) (First published in Epoch 14, No. 3 (Spring 1965) pp. 244–250)

"Coming Sun.Mon.Tues." (1966) (First published in Kenyon Review 28, No. 3 (June 1966), pp. 391–394.)

"Baghdad Towers West" (1967) (First published in Epoch 17, 1968, pp. 195–217.)

"The Uniforms" (1970) (First published in Carolina Quarterly 22, 1970, pp. 4–11.)

"In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century" (1971) (First published in Esquire, Dec. 1971, pp. 174–177, 243, 246.)

"Total Lost Weekend" (1972) (First published in Sports Illustrated, Nov. 27, 1972, pp. 98–101+)

"Creation" (1979) (First published in Antaeus No. 33, Spring 1979, pp. 32–46.)

"The Sightings" (1979) (First published in Weekend Magazine (Summer Fiction Issue, out of Toronto), August 4, 1979, pp. 26–30.)

"Human Moments in World War III" (1983) (First published in Esquire, July 1983, pp. 118–126.)

"The Ivory Acrobat" (1988) (First published in Granta 25, Autumn 1988, pp. 199–212.)

"The Runner" (1988) (First published in Harper's, Sept. 1988, pp. 61–63.)

"Pafko at the Wall" (1992) (First published in Harper's, Oct. 1992, pp. 35–70.)

"The Angel Esmeralda" (1995) (First published in Esquire, May 1994, pp. 100–109.)

"Baader-Meinhof" (2002) (First published in New Yorker, 1 April 2002, pp. 78–82.)

"Still Life" (2007) (First published in New Yorker, April 9, 2007)

"Midnight in Dostoevsky" (2009) (First Published in New Yorker, November 30, 2009)

"The Border of Fallen Bodies" (2009) (First Published in Esquire, April 21, 2009)

"Hammer and Sickle (short story)" (2010) (First published in Harper's, Dec. 2010, pp. 63–74)

Plays

The Engineer of Moonlight (1979)

The Day Room (first production 1986)

Valparaiso (first production 1999)

Love-Lies-Bleeding (first production 2005)

The Word for Snow (first production in 2007)

Screenplays

Game 6 (2005)

Game 6, the story of a playwright (played by Michael Keaton) and his obsession with the Boston Red Sox and the 1986 World Series, was written in the early 90s, but wasn't produced until 2005, ironically one year after the Red Sox won their first World Series title in 86 years. To date, it is DeLillo's only work for film.

Significant essays

"American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK" (1983) (Published in Rolling Stone, Dec. 8, 1983. DeLillo's first major published essay. Seen as signposting his interest in the JFK assassination that would ultimately lead to Libra)

"Salman Rushdie Defense" (1994) (Co-written with Paul Auster in defense of Salman Rushdie following the announcement of a fatwa upon him after the publication of The Satanic Verses)

"The Artist Naked in a Cage" (1997)(A short piece ran in The New Yorker on May 26, 1997, pages 6–7. An address delivered on May 13, 1997 at the New York Public Library's event "Stand In for Wei Jingsheng.")

"The Power of History" (1997) (Published in the Sept. 7, 1997 issue of the New York Times Magazine. Preceded the publication of Underworld and was viewed by many as a rationale for the novel)

"A History of the Writer Alone in a Room" (1999) (This piece is the acceptance address given by DeLillo on the occasion of being awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1999. A small pamphlet was printed with this address, an address by Scribner editor-in-chief Nan Graham, the Jury's Citation and an address by Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. It was reprinted in a German translation in Die Zeit in 2001. The piece is in five numbered sections, and is about five pages long.)

"In the Ruins of the Future" (Dec 2001) (This short essay appeared in Harper's magazine, December 2001 issue, pages 33–40. It concerns the Sept 11 incidents, terrorism, and America. It consists of eight numbered sections.)

Books about DeLillo

Bloom, Harold (ed.), Don DeLillo (Bloom's Major Novelists), Chelsea House, 2003.

Boxall, Peter, Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction, Routledge, 2006.

Civello, Paul, American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-century Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo, University of Georgia Press, 1994.

Cowart, David, Don DeLillo - The Physics of Language, University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Dewey, Joseph, Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo, University of South Carolina Press, 2006.

Dewey, Joseph (ed.), Kellman, Steven G. (ed.), Malin, Irving (ed.), Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld, University of Delaware Press, 2002.

Duvall, John, Don DeLillo's Underworld: A Reader's Guide, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002.

Duvall, John (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo, Cambridge UP, 2008

Engles, Tim (ed.), Duvall, John (ed.), Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise, Modern Language Association Press, 2006.

Giaimo, Paul. "Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of A Writer's Work", 2011.

Halldorson, Stephanie, The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo, 2007.

Hantke, Steffen, Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy, Peter Lang Publishing, 1994.

Kavadlo, Jesse, Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief, Peter Lang Publishing, 2004.

Keesey, Douglas, Don DeLillo, Macmillan, 1993.

Laist, Randy, Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels, Peter Lang Publishing, 2010.

LeClair, Tom In the Loop - Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel, University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Lentricchia, Frank (ed.), Introducing Don DeLillo, Duke University Press, 1991.

Lentricchia, Frank (ed.), New Essays on White Noise, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Martucci, Elise, The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo, Routledge, 2007.

Morley, Catherine, The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature, Routledge, New York, 2008.

Orr, Leonard, White Noise: A Reader's Guide Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003.

Osteen, Mark American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Ruppersburg, Hugh (ed.), Engles, Tim (ed.), Critical Essays on Don DeLillo, G.K. Hall, 2000.

Schuster, Marc "Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum", Cambria Press, 2008

Weinstein, Arnold, Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction From Hawthorne to DeLillo, Oxford University Press, 1993.

Awards and award nominations

1979 - DeLillo awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

1984 - Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters

1985 - National Book Award for White Noise

1985 - National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1985) for White Noise

1988 - National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1988) for Libra

1988 - New York Times Best Books of the Year (1988) for Libra

1988 - National Book Award finalist (Fiction, 1988) for Libra

1989 - Irish Times, Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for Libra

1991 - 1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II

1992 - 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination for Mao II

1995 - 1995 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award

1997 - National Book Award finalist nomination for Underworld

1997 - New York Times Best Books of the Year nominee for Underworld

1998 - 1998 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination for Underworld

1998 - 1998 American Book Award for Underworld

1999 - 1999 Jersalem Prize awarded for Underworld

2000 - 2000 William Dean Howells Medal awarded for Underworld

2000 - 2000 "Riccardo Bacchelli" International Award for Underworld

2001 - James Tait Black Memorial Prize shortlist (Fiction, 2001) for The Body Artist

2006 - 2006 New York Times: Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years (Runner-Up) for Underworld

2007 - 2007 New York Times Notable Book of the Year (Fiction and Poetry) for Falling Man

2007 - 2007 Booklist Top of the List: A Best of Editors Choice for Falling Man

2009 - 2009 Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service for achievements in literature

2010 - 2010 St Louis Literary Award

2010 - 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

References in popular culture

Paul Auster dedicated his books In the Country of Last Things and Leviathan to his friend Don DeLillo.

Ryan Boudinot and Neal Pollack contributed humor pieces to the journal McSweeney's satirizing DeLillo. A fictionalized DeLillo blogs for The Onion.

Conor Oberst begins his song "Gold Mine Gutted" with "It was Don DeLillo, whiskey neat, and a blinking midnight clock."

Rhett Miller references Libra in his song "World Inside a World" saying, "I read it in DeLillo, like he'd written it for me." The phrase, "There is a world inside the world", appears multiple times in the book.

The band The Airborne Toxic Event takes its name from a chemical gas leak of the same name in DeLillo's White Noise.

Too Much Joy's song "Sort of Haunted House" from Mutiny is inspired by DeLillo; similarly, Too Much Joy spin-off band, Wonderlick, takes its name from an intentional misspelling of the name of the protagonist from Great Jones Street.

David Foster Wallace claimed DeLillo, and Cynthia Ozick, as two of the greatest living writers of the English language.

In the 2009 film The Proposal, the Canadian-born editor in chief of a New York publisher risks deportation to meet DeLillo at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

References

8. Jacobs, Timothy. “Don DeLillo.” ''Conspiracy Theories in American History: An Encyclopedia''. Ed. Peter Knight. Oxford: ABC-CLIO Press, 2003. 219-220.

External links

DeLillo 'Featured Authors' page at NY Times

DeLillo Collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Literary Encyclopedia Biography

Don DeLillo's America website focused on Don DeLillo's work since 1996

Don DeLillo Bibliography listing all work by DeLillo, including interviews, profiles, blurbs and other miscellaneous DeLillo writings

Category:1936 births Category:American dramatists and playwrights Category:American novelists Category:American satirists Category:Copywriters Category:Fordham University alumni Category:American writers of Italian descent Category:Living people Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:People from the Bronx Category:Postmodern writers

bn:ডন ডিলিলো be-x-old:Дон Дэліла ca:Don DeLillo de:Don DeLillo es:Don DeLillo fr:Don DeLillo ga:Don DeLillo it:Don DeLillo he:דון דלילו hu:Don DeLillo nl:Don DeLillo ja:ドン・デリーロ no:Don DeLillo pl:Don DeLillo pt:Don DeLillo ru:Делилло, Дон simple:Don DeLillo sk:Don DeLillo sh:Don DeLillo fi:Don DeLillo sv:Don DeLillo tr:Don DeLillo zh:堂·德里罗

name	Melissa Block
birth date	c. 1962
education	Harvard UniversityUniversity of Geneva
occupation	Journalist
spouse	Stefan Fatsis
credits	National Public Radio }}

Melissa Block (born c. 1962) is an American radio host. She is one of the hosts of NPR's All Things Considered news program.

Biography

Block graduated from Harvard University in 1983 with a degree in French history and literature. She spent the subsequent year attending the University of Geneva as a Fulbright scholar. She is married to former Wall Street Journal reporter and NPR sports contributor Stefan Fatsis. She started with All Things Considered in 1985 as an editorial assistant. She later worked as editor, director, senior producer, and then as a correspondent in New York. Her 1999 report investigating rape as a weapon of war in Kosovo was cited when NPR News won an Overseas Press Club Award. Her September 11, 2001 reporting was part of coverage that earned NPR News a George Foster Peabody Award.

Block was recording an interview in Chengdu, China when the area was struck by a 7.9 magnitude earthquake. Her coverage of the earthquake earned NPR a George Foster Peabody Award.

See also

Michele Norris

Robert Siegel

References

External links

NPR biography

Category:1962 births Category:Living people Category:American radio journalists Category:National Public Radio personalities Category:Harvard University alumni Category:American women journalists Category:Place of birth missing (living people)

name	Saul Bellow
birth name	Solomon Bellow
birth date	June 10, 1915
birth place	Montreal, Quebec, Canada
alma mater	University of ChicagoNorthwestern UniversityUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
death date	April 05, 2005
death place	Brookline, Massachusetts, United States
nationality	Canadian/American
ethnicity	Jewish
awards
influences	The Bible, Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, Stendhal, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, Rudolf Steiner
influenced	Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Umberto Eco, Julian Barnes, John Berryman }}

Saul Bellow (June 10, 1915 – April 5, 2005) was a Canadian-born Jewish American writer. For his literary contributions, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award three times, and the only writer to have been nominated for it six times.

In the words of the Swedish Nobel Committee, his writing exhibited "the mixture of rich picaresque novel and subtle analysis of our culture, of entertaining adventure, drastic and tragic episodes in quick succession interspersed with philosophic conversation, all developed by a commentator with a witty tongue and penetrating insight into the outer and inner complications that drive us to act, or prevent us from acting, and that can be called the dilemma of our age." His best-known works include The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Seize the Day, Humboldt's Gift and Ravelstein. Widely regarded as one of the twentieth century's greatest authors, Bellow has had a "huge literary influence."

In 1989, Bellow received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The Helmerich Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.

Early life

Saul Bellow was born Solomon Bellow in Lachine, Quebec, two years after his parents emigrated from Saint Petersburg, Russia. Bellow celebrated his birthday in June, although he may have been born in July (in the Jewish community, it was customary to record the Hebrew date of birth, which does not always coincide with the Gregorian calendar). Of his family's emigration, Bellow wrote:

A period of illness from a respiratory infection at age eight both taught him self-reliance (he was a very fit man despite his sedentary occupation) and provided an opportunity to satisfy his hunger for reading: reportedly, he decided to be a writer when he first read Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

When Bellow was nine, his family moved to the Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago, the city that was to form the backdrop of many of his novels. Bellow's father, Abraham, was an onion importer. He also worked in a bakery, as a coal delivery man, and as a bootlegger. Bellow's mother, Liza, died when he was 17. He was left with his father and brother, Maurice. Maurice later married Joyce and they gave birth to Holly and David. His mother was deeply religious, and wanted her youngest son, Saul, to become a rabbi or a concert violinist. But he rebelled against what he later called the "suffocating orthodoxy" of his religious upbringing, and he began writing at a young age. Bellow's lifelong love for the Bible began at four when he learned Hebrew. Bellow also grew up reading William Shakespeare and the great Russian novelists of the 19th century. In Chicago, he took part in anthroposophical studies. Bellow attended Tuley High School on Chicago's west side where he befriended fellow writer Isaac Rosenfeld. In his 1959 novel Henderson the Rain King, Bellow modeled the character King Dahfu on Rosenfeld.

Education and early career

Bellow attended the University of Chicago but later transferred to Northwestern University. He originally wanted to study literature, but he felt the English department to be anti-Jewish; instead, he graduated with honors in anthropology and sociology. It has been suggested Bellow's study of anthropology had an interesting influence on his literary style, and anthropological references pepper his works. Bellow later did graduate work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Paraphrasing Bellow's description of his close friend Allan Bloom (see Ravelstein), John Podhoretz has said that both Bellow and Bloom "inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air."

In the 1930s, Bellow was part of the Chicago branch of the Works Progress Administration Writer's Project, which included such future Chicago literary luminaries as Richard Wright and Nelson Algren. Most of the writers were radical: if they were not card-carrying members of the Communist Party USA, they were sympathetic to the cause. Bellow was a Trotskyist, but because of the greater numbers of Stalinist-leaning writers he had to suffer their taunts.

In 1941 Bellow became a naturalized US citizen. In 1943, Maxim Lieber was his literary agent.

During World War II, Bellow joined the merchant marine and during his service he completed his first novel, Dangling Man (1944) about a young Chicago man waiting to be drafted for the war.

From 1946 through 1948 Bellow taught at the University of Minnesota, living on Commonwealth Avenue, in St. Paul, Minnesota.

In 1948, Bellow was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to move to Paris, where he began writing The Adventures of Augie March (1953). Critics have remarked on the resemblance between Bellow's picaresque novel and the great 17th Century Spanish classic Don Quixote. The book starts with one of American literature's most famous opening paragraphs, and it follows its titular character through a series of careers and encounters, as he lives by his wits and his resolve. Written in a colloquial yet philosophical style, The Adventures of Augie March established Bellow's reputation as a major author.

Return to Chicago

Bellow lived in New York City for a number of years, but he returned to Chicago in 1962 as a professor at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The committee's goal was to have professors work closely with talented graduate students on a multi-disciplinary approach to learning. Bellow taught on the committee for more than 30 years, alongside his close friend, the philosopher Allan Bloom.

There were also other reasons for Bellow's return to Chicago, where he moved into the Hyde Park neighborhood with his third wife, Susan Glassman. Bellow found Chicago to be vulgar but vital, and more representative of America than New York. He was able to stay in contact with old high school friends and a broad cross-section of society. In a 1982 profile, Bellow's neighborhood was described as a high-crime area in the city's center, and Bellow maintained he had to live in such a place as a writer and "stick to his guns."

Bellow hit the bestseller list in 1964 with his novel Herzog. Bellow was surprised at the commercial success of this cerebral novel about a middle-aged and troubled college professor who writes letters to friends, scholars and the dead, but never sends them. Bellow returned to his exploration of mental instability, and its relationship to genius, in his 1975 novel Humboldt's Gift. Bellow used his late friend and rival, the brilliant but self-destructive poet Delmore Schwartz, as his model for the novel's title character, Von Humboldt Fleisher. Bellow also used Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, anthroposophy, as a theme in the book, having attended a study group in Chicago. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969.

Nobel Prize

Propelled by the success of Humboldt's Gift, Bellow won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1976. In the 70-minute address he gave to an audience in Stockholm, Sweden, Bellow called on writers to be beacons for civilization and awaken it from intellectual torpor.

The following year, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Bellow for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities. Bellow's lecture was entitled "The Writer and His Country Look Each Other Over."

Bellow traveled widely throughout his life, mainly to Europe, which he sometimes visited twice a year. As a young man, Bellow went to Mexico City to meet Leon Trotsky, but the expatriate Russian revolutionary was assassinated the day before they were to meet. Bellow's social contacts were wide and varied. He tagged along with Robert F. Kennedy for a magazine profile he never wrote, he was close friends with the author Ralph Ellison. His many friends included the journalist Sydney J. Harris and the poet John Berryman.

While sales of Bellow's first few novels were modest, that turned around with Herzog. Bellow continued teaching well into his old age, enjoying its human interaction and exchange of ideas. He taught at Yale University, University of Minnesota, New York University, Princeton University, University of Puerto Rico, University of Chicago, Bard College and Boston University, where he co-taught a class with James Wood ('modestly absenting himself' when it was time to discuss Seize the Day). In order to take up his appointment at Boston, Bellow moved in 1993 from Chicago to Brookline, Massachusetts, where he died on April 5, 2005, at age 89. He is buried at the Jewish cemetery Shir HeHarim of Brattleboro, Vermont.

Bellow was married five times, with all but his last marriage ending in divorce. His son by his second marriage, Adam, published a nonfiction book In Praise of Nepotism in 2003. Bellow's wives were Anita Goshkin, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman, Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea and Janis Freedman. In 1999, when he was 84, Bellow had a daughter, his fourth child, with Freedman.

While he read voluminously, Bellow also played the violin and followed sports. Work was a constant for him, but he at times toiled at a plodding pace on his novels, frustrating the publishing company.

His early works earned him the reputation as one of the foremost novelists of the 20th century, and by his death he was widely regarded to be one of the greatest living novelists. He was the first novelist to win the National Book Award three times. His friend and protege Philip Roth has said of him, "The backbone of 20th-century American literature has been provided by two novelists – William Faulkner and Saul Bellow. Together they are the Melville, Hawthorne, and Twain of the 20th century." James Wood, in a eulogy of Bellow in The New Republic, wrote:

Themes and style

The author's works speak to the disorienting nature of modern civilization, and the countervailing ability of humans to overcome their frailty and achieve greatness (or at least awareness). Bellow saw many flaws in modern civilization, and its ability to foster madness, materialism and misleading knowledge. Principal characters in Bellow's fiction have heroic potential, and many times they stand in contrast to the negative forces of society. Often these characters are Jewish and have a sense of alienation or otherness.

Jewish life and identity is a major theme in Bellow's work, although he bristled at being called a "Jewish writer." Bellow's work also shows a great appreciation of America, and a fascination with the uniqueness and vibrancy of the American experience.

Bellow's work abounds in references and quotes from the likes of Marcel Proust and Henry James, but he offsets these high-culture references with jokes. Bellow interspersed autobiographical elements into his fiction, and many of his principal characters were said to bear a resemblance to him.

Criticism, controversy and conservative cultural activism

Martin Amis described Bellow as "The greatest American author ever, in my view".

For Linda Grant, "what Bellow had to tell us in his fiction was that it was worth it, being alive."

On the other hand, Bellow's detractors considered his work conventional and old-fashioned, as if the author was trying to revive the 19th century European novel. In a private letter, Vladimir Nabokov once referred to Bellow as a "miserable mediocrity." Journalist and author Ron Rosenbaum described Bellow's Ravelstein (2000) as the only book that rose above Bellow's failings as an author. Rosenbaum wrote,

Sam Tanenhaus wrote in New York Times Book Review in 2007:

But, Tanenhaus went on to answer his question:

V. S. Pritchett praised Bellow, finding his shorter works to be his best. Pritchett called Bellow's novella Seize the Day a "small gray masterpiece."

Bellow's account of his 1975 trip to Israel, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account, was criticized by Noam Chomsky in his 1983 book Fateful Triangle: the United States, Israel & the Palestinians. Bellow, Chomsky wrote, "sees an Israel where ‘almost everyone is reasonable and tolerant, and rancor against the Arabs is rare,’ where the people ‘think so hard, and so much’ as they ‘farm a barren land, industrialize it, build cities, make a society, do research, philosophize, write books, sustain a great moral tradition, and finally create an army of tough fighters.’ He has also been criticized for having praised Joan Peters's book, From Time Immemorial, which denied the existence of Palestinians and was exposed almost immediately after publication as containing gross falsifications of the sources it cited.

As he grew older, Bellow moved decidedly away from leftist politics and became identified with cultural conservatism. His opponents included feminism, campus activism and postmodernism. In 1995 along with Lynne V. Cheney and other noted conservatives, he helped found the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) based in Washington, D.C. and funded by the conservative Bradley Foundation and John M. Olin Foundation Promoting the Core Curriculum view of liberal education, the ACTA is best known for its 2001 report, Defending Civilization . . . , which met with wide criticism and accusations of neo-McCarthyism, because it served as a broadside against a "liberal academia" that the report authors saw as being insufficiently patriotic and "soft" on international terrorism. Following a barrage of criticism, ACTA published a "revised and expanded" version.

Bellow also thrust himself into the often contentious realm of Jewish and African-American relations. In Mr. Sammler's Planet, Bellow's portrayal of a black pickpocket who exposes himself in public was criticized, by some activists, as racist. In 2007, attempts to name a street after Bellow in his Hyde Park neighborhood were scotched by local alderman on the grounds that Bellow had made remarks about the neighborhood's current inhabitants that they considered racist.

In an interview in the March 7, 1988 New Yorker, Bellow sparked a controversy when he asked, concerning multiculturalism, "Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I'd be glad to read him." The taunt was seen by some as a slight against non-Western literature. Bellow at first claimed to have been misquoted. Later, writing in his defense in the New York Times, he said, "The scandal is entirely journalistic in origin... Always foolishly trying to explain and edify all comers, I was speaking of the distinction between literate and preliterate societies. For I was once an anthropology student, you see." Bellow claimed to have remembered shortly after making his infamous comment that he had in fact read a Zulu novel in translation: Chaka by Thomas Mofolo (an inaccuracy remains in this: Mofolo's novel is in Sesotho, not Zulu).

Despite his identification with Chicago, he kept aloof from some of that city's more conventional writers. Studs Terkel in a 2006 interview with Stop Smiling magazine said of Bellow: "I didn't know him too well. We disagreed on a number of things politically. In the protests in the beginning of Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night, when Mailer, Robert Lowell and Paul Goodman were marching to protest the Vietnam War, Bellow was invited to a sort of counter-gathering. He said, 'Of course I'll attend'. But he made a big thing of it. Instead of just saying OK, he was proud of it. So I wrote him a letter and he didn't like it. He wrote me a letter back. He called me a Stalinist. But otherwise, we were friendly. He was a brilliant writer, of course. I love Seize the Day."

Quotations

"[There is] an immense, painful longing for a broader, more flexible, fuller, more coherent, more comprehensive account of what we human beings are, who we are and what this life is for."

"I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction."

"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep."

"People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned."

Bibliography

for a complete list of works see Bibliography of Saul Bellow

Novels and novellas

Dangling Man (1944)

The Victim (1947)

The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

Seize the Day (1956)

Henderson the Rain King (1959)

Herzog (1964)

Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970)

Humboldt's Gift (1975), won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize

The Dean's December (1982)

More Die of Heartbreak (1987)

A Theft (1989)

The Bellarosa Connection (1989)

The Actual (1997)

Ravelstein (2000)

Short Story Collections

Mosby's Memoirs (1968)

Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)

Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (1991)

Collected Stories (2001)

Library of America editions

Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March (2003)

Novels 1956-1964: Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog (2007)

Novels 1970-1982: Mr. Sammler’s Planet, Humboldt’s Gift, The Dean’s December (2010)

Translations

Gimpel the Fool (1945) by Isaac Bashevis Singer (trans. by Bellow in 1953)

Non-Fiction

To Jerusalem and Back (1976) - Memoir

It All Adds Up (1994) - Essay collection

Saul Bellow: Letters, edited by Benjamin Taylor (2010) - Correspondence

Works about Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow, Tony Tanner (1965) (see also his City of Words [1971])

Saul Bellow, Malcolm Bradbury (1982)

Saul Bellow Drumlin Woodchuck,Mark Harris, University of Georgia Press. (1982)

Saul Bellow: Modern Critical Views, Harold Bloom (Ed.) (1986)

Handsome Is: Adventures with Saul Bellow, Harriet Wasserman (1997)

Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism, Michael K Glenday (1990)

Saul Bellow: A Biography of the Imagination, Ruth Miller, St. Martins Pr. (1991)

Bellow: A Biography, James Atlas (2000)

"Even Later" and "The American Eagle" in Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché (2001) are celebratory. The latter essay is also found in the Everyman's Library edition of Augie March.

'Saul Bellow's comic style': James Wood in The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, 2004. ISBN 0-224-06450-9.

The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo , Stephanie Halldorson (2007)

Saul Bellow a song, written by Sufjan Stevens on The Avalanche

See also

List of Jewish Nobel laureates

PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction

Wilhelm Reich

References

External links

Mr. Sammler's City, City Journal, Spring 2008

Nobel site with two speeches (one of which is an audio recording) & longer biography

Annotated Bibliography of Criticism by the Saul Bellow Society

Bellow's 1955 autobiographical statement for reference book

JM Coetzee on the early novels

Slate's assortment of other writers' takes on Bellow, mostly eulogistic

Joyce Carol Oates on Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.

Blogpost on Bellow's Russian family name–Belo or Belov?

Review of Bellow's collected letters

Saul Bellow, a neocon’s tale by John Podhoretz

Reflections with Saul Bellow by Dejan Stojanović

Saul Bellow's grave, Brattleboro, Vermont

'Between Fiction and Autobiography', review of Letters in The Oxonian Review

"Bellow and Trotsky", Judie Newman, Berfrois, 1 June 2011

Category:1915 births Category:2005 deaths Category:American Nobel laureates Category:American people of Canadian-Jewish descent Category:American people of Russian-Jewish descent Category:American short story writers Category:American socialists Category:American Trotskyists Category:Anthroposophists Category:Bard College faculty Category:Canadian emigrants to the United States Category:Jewish Canadian writers Category:Canadian Nobel laureates Category:Canadian novelists Category:Canadian people of Russian descent Category:Anglophone Quebec people Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Guggenheim Fellows Category:Jewish American novelists Category:National Book Award winners Category:New York University faculty Category:Nobel laureates in Literature Category:Northwestern University alumni Category:O. Henry Award winners Category:People from Brookline, Massachusetts Category:People from Montreal Category:People of the New Deal arts projects Category:Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners Category:United States National Medal of Arts recipients Category:University of Chicago alumni Category:University of Chicago faculty Category:University of Wisconsin–Madison alumni Category:Works Progress Administration workers Category:Writers from Chicago, Illinois Category:Postmodern writers

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name	Terry Gross
birth date	February 14, 1951
ethnicity	Jewish
show	Fresh Air
station	WHYY-FM, NPR
country	U.S.
website	Official Website }}

Terry Gross (born February 14, 1951 ) is the host and co-executive producer of Fresh Air, an interview format radio show produced by WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and distributed throughout the United States by National Public Radio.

Gross has won praise over the years for her low-key and friendly yet often probing interview style and for the diversity of her guests. She has a reputation for researching her guests' work largely the night before an interview, often asking them unexpected questions about their early career.

Life and career

Gross grew up in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York in a Jewish family. She earned a Bachelor's degree in English and a Master's in communications from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She began a teaching career, but said that she was "totally unequipped" for the job, and was fired after only six weeks.

Gross began her radio career in 1973 at WBFO, a public radio station in Buffalo, New York, where she had been volunteering. In 1975, she moved to WHYY-FM in Philadelphia to host and produce Fresh Air, which was a local interview program at the time. In 1985, Fresh Air with Terry Gross went national, being distributed weekly by NPR. It became a daily program two years later.

She also starred as a guest-voice on The Simpsons as herself.

Interview style

The San Francisco Chronicle wrote that Gross's interviews are "a remarkable blend of empathy, warmth, genuine curiosity, and sharp intelligence." Gross prides herself on preparation; prior to interviewing guests, she reads their books, watches their movies, and/or listens to their CDs. The Boston Phoenix opined that "Terry Gross…is almost certainly the best cultural interviewer in America, and one of the best all-around interviewers, period. Her smart, thoughtful questioning pushes her guests in unlikely directions. Her interviews are revelatory in a way other people's seldom are."

Gross treats different guests differently, depending on a variety of factors. She is often perceived as more challenging with political figures to the right than with people to the left of center, and the same is perceived with guests who are in the arts, who may be less prepared for such interviews and less prone to expressing themselves in canned "sound-bites."

Clashes with guests

Gross has drawn added public attention following some occasions when she has clashed with her guests, including these:

The February 4, 2002 interview with Kiss lead singer and bassist Gene Simmons began with Gross mispronouncing Simmons' original Hebrew last name. Simmons dismissively replied to her that she mispronounced it because she had a Gentile mouth. Gross replied that her mouth was not Gentile. Gross questioned Simmons' views on the importance of money. In the interview Gross begins a question "so having sex with you" to which Simmons interjects, "you're going to have to stand in line." Gross continued with questioning Simmons about his many liaisons. Later Simmons said "If you want to welcome me with open arms, I'm afraid you're also going to have to welcome me with open legs," to which Gross replied, "That's a really obnoxious thing to say." Unlike most Fresh Air guests, Simmons refused to grant permission for the interview to be made available online on NPR. However, the interview appears in Gross's book All I Did Was Ask, and unauthorized transcripts and audio of the complete original interview exist. An October 8, 2003 interview with Fox News television host Bill O'Reilly, who walked out of the interview because of what he considered were biased questions, creating a media controversy fed by the ongoing presidential campaign. Toward the end of the interview, O'Reilly asked Gross if she had been as tough on Al Franken, who had appeared on the program two weeks before O'Reilly. Gross responded, "No, I wasn't...we had a different interview." Gross was later criticized by then NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin for "an interview that was, in the end, unfair to O'Reilly" and that "it felt as though Terry Gross was indeed 'carrying Al Franken's water.'" Dvorkin described Gross's interviewing tactic of reading a quote critical of O'Reilly after he had walked out of the room as "unethical and unfair". Gross was later supported by an NPR colleague, Mike Pesca, who contended that O'Reilly did have the opportunity to respond to a criticism that Gross read to O'Reilly leveled by People magazine but that he defaulted by prematurely abandoning the interview. On September 24, 2004, Gross and O'Reilly met again on O'Reilly's television show in which Gross assured O'Reilly "that no matter what you ask me, I'm staying for the entire interview." A February 9, 2005, interview of Lynne Cheney, conservative author and wife of then-Vice President Dick Cheney. The initial focus of the interview was on Cheney's latest history book, but Gross moved on to questions about Cheney's lesbian daughter Mary and her opinion of the Bush administration's opposition to same-sex marriage. Cheney declined to comment on her daughter's sexuality, but repeatedly stated her opposition to a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, which was being endorsed by President Bush. Cheney declined to discuss the matter further. Later, when Gross brought the interview back to issues of gay rights, Cheney again refused to comment. According to producers, Cheney had been warned that Gross would be asking about politics and current events.

Personal life

Gross was married early on in her life, but was in divorce proceedings by the time she started her radio career in 1973. She is now married to Francis Davis, jazz critic of the Village Voice. The couple have no children. In an interview with B. D. Wong, Gross said this is a deliberate choice on their part.

Gross wrote in the introduction to All I Did Was Ask: Conversations With Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists that she is sometimes asked whether she is a lesbian, due to her short haircut as well as the number of Fresh Air guests from the entertainment industry; the passage included one memorable instance where a guest at a social occasion speculated on Gross' sexual orientation to Gross' own mother-in-law. In her interview with Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, she mentioned that she had lived in a commune.

Awards

1981 Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award for "Best Live Radio Program,"

1987 Ohio State Award

1993 Peabody Award

1999 The Foundation of American Women In Radio and Television's Gracie Allen Award

2003 CPB Edward R. Murrow Award

2007 Literarian Award, National Book Foundation

2008 WHYY National Book Foundation Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community

Bibliography

Audio collections

(1998) Fresh Air: On Stage & Screen (cassette)

(2000) Fresh Air on Stage and Screen Vol 2 (CD)

(2004) Fresh Air Laughs with Terry Gross [UNABRIDGED] (CD)

References

External links

NPR biography

in 1997

Category:1951 births Category:Living people Category:American broadcast news analysts Category:American talk radio hosts Category:National Public Radio personalities Category:Peabody Award winners Category:People from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn Category:University at Buffalo alumni

fi:Terry Gross

{{infobox writer | name

Paul Auster | image Paul Auster BBF 2010 Shankbone.jpg | caption Auster at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival | imagesize | pseudonym Paul Queen Paul Benjamin | birth_name Paul Benjamin Auster | birth_date February 03, 1947 | birth_place Newark, NJ, United States | death_date | death_place | occupation Novelist and poet | nationality American | period 1974 – present | genre Absurdist fiction, crime fiction, mystery fiction | subject | movement Postmodernism | influences Michel de Montaigne, William Shakespeare, Miguel de Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, James Joyce, Maurice Blanchot, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Jorge Luis Borges, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Dashiell Hammett, Knut Hamsun, Charles Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Edgar Allan Poe, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jabès | influenced Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Jason Thornberry, Christopher Moore, Bill Bryson, Steven Wright, Steven Hall, Hideo Kojima | signature

website

}}

Paul Benjamin Auster (born February 3, 1947) is an American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning in works such as The New York Trilogy (1987), Moon Palace (1989), The Music of Chance (1990), The Book of Illusions (2002) and The Brooklyn Follies (2005).

Biography

Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish middle class parents of Polish descent Samuel and Queenie Auster. He grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and graduated from Columbia High School in adjoining Maplewood. After graduating from Columbia University in 1970, he moved to Paris, France where he earned a living translating French literature. Since returning to the U.S. in 1974, he has published poems, essays, novels of his own as well as translations of French writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Joseph Joubert.

He and his second wife, writer Siri Hustvedt, were married in 1981, and they live in Brooklyn. Together they have one daughter, Sophie Auster. Previously, Auster was married to the acclaimed writer Lydia Davis. They had one son together, Daniel Auster.

He is also the Vice-President of PEN American Center.

Writing

Following his acclaimed debut work, a memoir entitled The Invention of Solitude, Auster gained renown for a series of three loosely-connected detective stories published collectively as The New York Trilogy. These books are not conventional detective stories organized around a mystery and a series of clues. Rather, he uses the detective form to address existential issues and questions of identity, space, language and literature, creating his own distinctively postmodern (and critique of postmodernist) form in the process. Comparing the two works, Auster said, "I believe the world is filled with strange events. Reality is a great deal more mysterious than we ever give it credit for. In that sense, the Trilogy grows directly out of The Invention of Solitude.

The search for identity and personal meaning has permeated Auster's later publications, many of which concentrate heavily on the role of coincidence and random events (The Music of Chance) or increasingly, the relationships between men and their peers and environment (The Book of Illusions, Moon Palace). Auster's heroes often find themselves obliged to work as part of someone else's inscrutable and larger-than-life schemes. In 1995, Auster wrote and co-directed the films Smoke (which won him the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay) and Blue in the Face. Auster's more recent works, Oracle Night (2003), The Brooklyn Follies (2005) and the novella Travels in the Scriptorium have also met critical acclaim.

Themes

According to a dissertation by Heiko Jakubzik at the University of Heidelberg, two central influences in Paul Auster's writing are Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis and the American transcendentalism of the early to middle 19th century, namely amongst others Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

In short Lacan's theory declares that we enter the world through words. We observe the world through our senses but the world we sense is structured (mediated) in our mind through language. Thus our subconscious is also structured as a language. This leaves us with a sense of anomaly. We can only perceive the world through language, but we have the feeling of something missing. This is the sense of being outside language. The world can only be constructed through language but it always leaves something uncovered, something that cannot be told or be thought of, it can only be sensed. This can be seen as one of the central themes of Paul Auster's writing.

Lacan is considered to be one of the key figures of French poststructuralism. Some academics are keen to discern traces of other poststructuralist philosophers throughout Auster's oeuvre - mainly Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Michel de Certeau - although Auster himself has claimed to find such philosophies 'unreadable'.

The transcendentalists believe that the symbolic order of civilization separated us from the natural order of the world. By moving into nature - like Thoreau in Walden - it would be possible to return to this natural order.

The common factor of both ideas is the question of the meaning of symbols for human beings. Auster's protagonists are often writers who establish meaning in their lives through writing, and they try to find their place within the natural order to be able to live within "civilization" again.

Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel Beckett, and Herman Melville have also had a strong influence on Auster's writing. Not only do their characters reappear in Auster's work (like William Wilson in City of Glass or Hawthorne's Fanshawe in The Locked Room, both from The New York Trilogy), Auster also uses variations on the themes of these writers.

Paul Auster's reappearing subjects are:

coincidence

frequent portrayal of an ascetic life

a sense of imminent disaster

obsessive writer as central character/narrator

loss of the ability to understand

loss of language

depiction of daily and ordinary life

failure

absence of a father

writing/story telling, metafiction

intertextuality

American History

American Space

Coincidence

Instances of coincidence can be found throughout Auster's work. Auster himself claims that people are so influenced by the continuity among them that they do not see the elements of coincidence, inconsistency and contradiction in their own lives:

Failure

Failure in Paul Auster's works is not just the opposite of the happy ending. In Moon Palace and The Book of Illusions it comes from the individual's uncertainty about the status of his own identity. The protagonists start a search for their own identity and reduce their life to the absolute minimum. From this zero point they gain new strength and start their new life and they are also able to regain contact with their surroundings. A similar development can also be seen in City of Glass and The Music of Chance.

Failure in this context is not the "nothing" - it is the beginning of something all new.

Identity/Subjectivity

Auster's protagonists often go through a process that reduces their support structure to an absolute minimum: They sever all contact with family and friends, go hungry and lose or give away all their belongings. Out of this state of "nothingness" they either acquire new strength to reconnect with the world or they fail and disappear for good.

Reception

"Over the past twenty-five years," opined Michael Dirda in The New York Review of Books in 2008, "Paul Auster has established one of the most distinctive niches in contemporary literature." Dirda has also extolled his loaded virtues in The Washington Post:

Ever since City of Glass, the first volume of his New York Trilogy, Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination. His plots — drawing on elements from suspense stories, existential récit and autobiography — keep readers turning the pages, but sometimes end by leaving them uncertain about what they've just been through.

Respected literary critic James Wood, however, offers Auster little praise in his piece "Shallow Graves" in the November 30, 2009, issue of The New Yorker:

What Auster often gets instead is the worst of both worlds: fake realism and shallow skepticism. The two weaknesses are related. Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough.

Awards

1989 Prix France Culture de Littérature Étrangère for The New York Trilogy

1990 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

1991 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for The Music of Chance

1993 Prix Médicis Étranger for Leviathan

1996 Bodil Awards - Best American Film: Smoke

1996 Independent Spirit Award - Best First Screenplay: Smoke

1996 John William Corrington Award for Literary Excellence

2003 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

2006 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (received in previous years by Günter Grass, Arthur Miller and Mario Vargas Llosa)

2006 Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Literature

2007 Honorary doctor from the University of Liège

Published works

Fiction

Squeeze Play (1982) (Written under pseudonym Paul Benjamin)

The New York Trilogy (1987)

*City of Glass (1985)

*Ghosts (1986)

*The Locked Room (1986)

In the Country of Last Things (1987)

Moon Palace (1989)

The Music of Chance (1990)

Auggie Wren's Christmas Story (1990)

Leviathan (1992)

Mr. Vertigo (1994)

Timbuktu (1999)

The Book of Illusions (2002)

Oracle Night (2003)

The Brooklyn Follies (2005)

Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)

Man in the Dark (2008)

Invisible (2009) Sunset Park (2010)

Poetry

Disappearances: Selected Poems (1988)''

Ground Work: Selected Poems and Essays 1970-1979 (1991)''

Collected Poems (2007)''

Screenplays

The Music of Chance (1993)

Smoke (1995)

Blue in the Face (1995)

Lulu on the Bridge (1998)

The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007) – "The Inner Life of Martin Frost" is a screenplay that is mentioned in Auster's novel `The Book of Illusions.' It's the only film that the protagonist watches of Hector Mann's later, hidden films. It's a simple story of a man meeting a girl, and an intense relationship, and her vanishing.

Essays, memoirs, and autobiographies

The Invention of Solitude (1982)

The Art of Hunger (1992)

The Red Notebook (1995) (The Red Notebook was originally printed in Granta (44)). (1993).

Hand to Mouth (1997)

Collected Prose (contains The Invention of Solitude, The Art of Hunger, The Red Notebook, and Hand to Mouth as well as various other previously uncollected pieces) (first edition, 2005; expanded second edition, 2010)

Edited collections

The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (1982)

True Tales of American Life (First published under the title I Thought My Father Was God, and Other True Tales from NPR's National Story Project) (2001)

Translations

"The Uninhabited: Selected Poems of Andre du Bouchet" (1976)

Life/Situations, by Jean-Paul Sartre,1977 (in collaboration with Lydia Davis)

A Tomb for Anatole, by Stéphane Mallarmé (1983)

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1998) (translation of Pierre Clastres' ethnography Chronique des indiens Guayaki)

The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert (2005)

Vicious Circles: Two fictions & "After the Fact", by Maurice Blanchot,1999

Miscellaneous

The Story of My Typewriter with paintings by Sam Messer (2002)

"The Accidental Rebel" (Wed. April 23 article in New York Times)

Other media

On the album As Smart as We Are by New York band One Ring Zero, Auster wrote the lyrics for the song "Natty Man Blues" based on Cincinnati poet Norman Finkelstein.

In 2005 his daughter, Sophie, recorded an album of songs in both French and English, entitled Sophie Auster, with the band One Ring Zero. The lyrics of three of the songs (in English) are by Paul Auster; and he also provided for the accompanying booklet translations of several French poems which form the lyrics of other songs on the album.

In 1993, a movie adaptation of The Music of Chance was released. Auster features in a cameo role at the end of the film.

In 1994 City of Glass was adapted as a graphic novel by artist David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik. Auster's friend, noted cartoonist Art Spiegelman, produced the adaptation.

Jazz trumpeter and composer Michael Mantler's album Hide and Seek uses words by Auster from the play of the same name.

Paul Auster's voice can be heard on the 2005 album entitled We Must Be Losing It by The Farangs. The two tracks are entitled "Obituary in the Present Tense" and "Between the Lines".

In 2006 Paul Auster directed the film The Inner Life of Martin Frost, based on an original screenplay by himself. It was shot in Lisbon and Azenhas do Mar and starred David Thewlis, Iréne Jacob and Michael Imperioli as well as Auster's daughter Sophie. Auster himself provided the narration, albeit uncredited. The film premiered at the European Film Market, as part of the 2007 Berlinale in Berlin, Germany on February 10, 2007, and opened in New York City on September 7 of the same year.

The lyrics of Fionn Regan's 2006 song Put A Penny In The Slot mention Auster and his novella Timbuktu.

Austrian composer Olga Neuwirth's composition ... ce qui arrive ... (2004) combines the recorded voice of Paul Auster with ensemble music and live electronics by Markus Noisternig and Thomas Musil (Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics (IEM)). Paul Auster is heard reading from his books Hand to Mouth and The Red Notebook, either as straight recitation, integrated with other sounds as if in a radio play, or passed through an electronically realized string resonator so that the low tones can interact with these of a string ensemble. A film by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster runs throughout the work featuring the cabaret artist and actress Georgette Dee.

Paul Auster narrated "Ground Zero" (2004), an audio guide created by the Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) and Soundwalk and produced by NPR, which won the Dalton Pen Award for Multi-media/Audio, (2005), and was nominated for an Audie Award for best Original Work, (2005).

In the 2008 Russian film Плюс один (Plus One), the main character is in the process of translating one of Auster's books.

In the 2009 documentary "Act of God", Auster is interviewed on his experience of being struck by lightning as a boy.

See also

Paul is the older cousin of conservative columnist Lawrence Auster.

References

Dirda, Michael. "Spellbound." The New York Review of Books, 4 December 2008.

—. "Strange things begin to happen when a writer buys a new notebook". The Washington Post, 21 December 2003.

Notes

Further reading

Paul Auster, Gérard de Cortanze La solitude du labyrinthe. Paris:Actes Sud, 1997.

Franchot Ballinger Ambigere: The Euro-American Picaro and the Native American Trickster. MELUS, 17 (1991–92), pp. 21–38.

Dennis Barone (ed.): Beyond the Red Notebook. Essays on Paul Auster. Penn Studies in Contemporary American Fiction. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (2. ed. 1996)

Dennis Barone Auster’s Memory. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 32–34

Charles Baxter The Bureau of Missing Persons: Notes on Paul Auster’s Fiction. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 40–43.

Harold Bloom ed. Paul Auster. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publ.; 2004.

Martine Chard-Hutchinson Paul Auster (1947- ). In: Joel Shatzky and Michael Taub (eds.). Contemporary Jewish-American Novelists: A Bio-Critical Sourcebook. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997, pp. 13–20.

Alain Chareyre-Méjan, Guillaume Pigeard de Gurbert. Ce que Paul Auster n’a jamais dit: une logique du quelconque. In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L’oeuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 176–184.

Gérard de Cortanze, James Rudnick: Paul Austers New York. Gerstenberg, New York; Hildesheim, 1998

Gérard de Cortanze Le New York de Paul Auster. Paris: Les Éditions du Chêne-Hachette Livre, 1996.

Robert Creeley Austerities. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 35–39.

Scott Dimovitz, 'Public Personae and the Private I: De-Compositional Ontology in Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.' MFS: Modern Fiction Studies. 52:3 (Fall 2006): 613-633.

Scott Dimovitz, 'Portraits in Absentia: Repetition, Compulsion, and the Postmodern Uncanny in Paul Auster's Leviathan.' Studies in the Novel. 40:4 (Winter 2008): 447-464.

William Drenttel (ed.) Paul Auster: A Comprehensive Bibliographic Checklist of Published Works 1968-1994. New York: Delos Press, 1994.

Sven Gächter Schreiben ist eine endlose Therapie: Der amerikanische Romancier Paul Auster über das allmähliche Entstehen von Geschichten. Weltwoche (31.12.1992), p. 30.

François Gavillon Paul Auster, gravité et légèreté de l'écriture. Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2000.

Charles Grandjeat Le hasard et la nécessité dans l’oeuvre de Paul Auster. In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L’oeuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 153–163.

Ulrich Greiner: Gelobtes Land. Amerikanische Schriftsteller über Amerika. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1997

Claude Grimal Paul Auster au coeur des labyrinthes. Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle, 68:733 (1990), pp. 64–66.

Allan Gurganus How Do You Introduce Paul Auster in Three Minutes?. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 7–8.

Anne M. Holzapfel: The New York trilogy. Whodunit? Tracking the structure of Paul Auster’s anti-detective novels. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1996. (= Studien zur Germanistik und Anglistik; 11) ISBN 3-631-49798-9

Beate Hötger: Identität im filmischen Werk von Paul Auster. Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2002. (= Europäische Hochschulschriften; Reihe 30, 84) ISBN 3-631-38470-X Heiko Jakubzik: Paul Auster und die Klassiker der American Renaissance. Dissertation, Universität Heidelberg 1999 (online text)

Bernd Herzogenrath An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdam: Rodopi; 1999

Bernd Herzogenrath Introduction. In: Bernd Herzogenrath. An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 1–11.

Gerald Howard Publishing Paul Auster. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 92–95.

Peter Kirkegaard, Cities, Signs, Meanings in Walter Benjamin and Paul Auster: Or, Never Sure of Any of It in Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies 48 (1993): 161179.

Barry Lewis The Strange Case of Paul Auster. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 53–61.

James Marcus Auster! Auster!. The Village Voice, 39 (August 30, 1994), pp. 55–56.

Brian McHale Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Patricia Merivale The Austerized Version. Contemporary Literature, 38:1 (Spring 1997), pp. 185–197.

Christophe Metress Iles et archipels, sauver ce qui est récupérable: la fiction de Paul Auster. In: Annick Duperray (ed.). L’oeuvre de Paul Auster: approches et lectures plurielles. Actes du colloque Paul Auster. Aix-en-Provence: Actes Sud, 1995, pp. 245–257.

James Peacock Carrying the Burden of Representation: Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions. Journal of American Studies, 40:1 (April 2006), pp. 53–70.

Werner Reinhart: Pikareske Romane der 80er Jahre. Ronald Reagan und die Renaissance des politischen Erzählens in den USA. (Acker, Auster, Boyle, Irving, Kennedy, Pynchon). Narr, Tübingen 2001

William Riggan Picaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1981.

Mark Rudman Paul Auster: Some ‚Elective Affinities‘. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 44–45.

Michael Rutschky Die Erfindung der Einsamkeit: Der amerikanische Schriftsteller Paul Auster. Merkur, 45 (1991), pp. 1105–1113.

Edward H. Schafer Ways of Looking at the Moon Palace. Asia Major. 1988; 1(1):1-13.

Steffen Sielaff: Die postmoderne Odyssee. Raum und Subjekt in den Romanen von Paul Auster. Univ. Diss., Berlin 2004. Joseph C. Schöpp Ausbruch aus der Mimesis: Der amerikanische Roman im Zeichen der Postmoderne. München: Fink, 1990.

Motoyuki Shibata Being Paul Auster’s Ghost. In: Dennis Barone (ed.). Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 183–188.

Carsten Springer: Crises. The works of Paul Auster. Lang, Frankfurt am Main u.a. 2001. (= American culture; 1) ISBN 3-631-37487-9

Carsten Springer: A Paul Auster Sourcebook. Frankfurt a. Main u. a., Peter Lang, 2001.

Eduardo Urbina: La ficción que no cesa: Paul Auster y Cervantes. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2007.

Eduardo Urbina: La ficción que no cesa: Cervantes y Paul Auster. Cervantes en el ámbito anglosajón. Eds. Diego Martínez Torrón and Bernd Dietz. Madrid: SIAL Ediciones, 2005. 433-42.

Eduardo Urbina: Reflejos lunares, o la transformación paródica de la locura quijotesca en Moon Palace (1989) de Paul Auster. Siglos dorados; Homenaje a Augustin Redondo. Ed. Pierre Civil. Madrid: Castalia, 2004. 2: 1417-25.

Eduardo Urbina: Parodias cervantinas: el Quijote en tres novelas de Paul Auster (La ciudad de cristal, El palacio de la luna y El libro de las ilusiones). ‘Calamo currente’: Homenaje a Juan Bautista de Avalle Arce. Ed. Miguel Zugasti. RILCE (Universidad de Navarra) 23.1 (2007): 245-56.

Eduardo Urbina: Reading Matters: Quixotic Fiction and Subversive Discourse in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions Critical Reflections: Essays on Golden Age Spanish Literature in Honor of James A. Parr. Eds. Barbara Simerka and Amy R. Williamsen. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006. 57-66.

Various Authors. Special edition on Paul Auster. Critique. 1998 Spring; 39(3).

Aliki Varvogli "World That is the Book: Paul Auster's Fiction". Liverpool University press, 2001. ISBN 978-0-85323-697-9

Florian Felix Weyh Paul Auster. Kritisches Lexikon der fremdsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur (26. Nachlieferung), pp. 1–10.

Curtis White The Auster Instance: A Ficto-Biography. The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14:1 (Spring 1994), pp. 26–29.

Eric Wirth A Look Back from the Horizon. In: Dennis Barone (ed.). Beyond the Red Notebook: Essays on Paul Auster. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 171–182.

John Zilcosky The Revenge of the Author: Paul Auster’s Challenge to Theory. Critique, 39:3 (Spring 1998), pp. 195–206.

External links

'The Searcher', interview with The Guardian in May 1999

'An Interview with Paul Auster', interview with 3:AM Magazine in November 2001

'Dem old Bush blues', interview with The Times in April 2004

'The Tyrannies and Epiphanies of Chance', interview in the Oxonian Review in June 2004

'Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt in conversation' at the Key West Literary Seminar in September 2007 (audio)

George Dunford interviews Paul Auster, interview with Cordite Poetry Review in August 2008

'Interview: Paul Auster on His Newest Novel, Man in the Dark', interview with Village Voice in September 2008

Interview with Auster, discussing Man in the Dark with George Miller in November 2008 (audio)

'The mechanics of reality', discussion between Paul Auster and school students in January 2009 (includes audio)

I want to tell you a story piece by Auster at The Guardian, November 6, 2006. The subtitle reads: "one of America's greatest living novelists, argues that fiction is 'magnificently useless', but the act of creation and the pleasure of reading are incomparable human joys that we should savour"

Paul Auster: Bio, excerpts, interviews and articles in the archives of the Prague Writers' Festival

'Dossier - The Brooklyn Follies', a collection of essays on Paul Auster's The Brooklyn Follies (English and French), on La Clé des Langues

Category:1947 births Category:Living people Category:American novelists Category:American poets Category:American essayists Category:American screenwriters Category:American film directors Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Independent Spirit Award winners Category:American expatriates in France Category:American translators Category:People from Newark, New Jersey Category:People from South Orange, New Jersey Category:Members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Category:Writers from New York Category:Prix Médicis étranger winners Category:Jewish American novelists Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Category:Postmodern writers

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