(born 1936) Author of eleven novels, including White Noise, The Names, Mao II, Underworld and Americana, the title of which announced his gradually emerging project. DeLillo has patiently assembled individual and group portraits since the 1950s. He knows American quirks of character, especially quirks of language: no American writer alive has a better ear. Incomparably craft-conscious (humble before punctuation), DeLillo shames poets with his rhythmic, mouth-oriented prose and sometimes scares readers with his ability to access our internal modems, to appropriate and make art of our unspoken broken English.

Other writers’ narrators talk to themselves; his DeLilloquize.