Born in 1936, Don DeLillo grew up in The Bronx and graduated from Fordham University. He wrote his first work of fiction while working as an advertising copywriter and published his first novel, Americana, in 1971. Since then he has produced fourteen novels, one novella, five plays, and many stories and essays. In 1985, DeLillo’s eighth novel, White Noise, won a National Book Award. In 1988 his novel Libra was selected as a National Book Award Finalist and received the first Irish Times International Fiction Prize. His novel Underworld was selected as both a National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize Finalist and received the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, given for the best novel published in the previous five years; in 2006 Underworld was placed number two on the New York Times’s list of “The Best Books of the Last 25 Years,” (after Toni Morrison’s Beloved). DeLillo’s novel Mao II received the 1992 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist. His short story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, was a Finalist for both the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award and the 2011 Story Prize.

DeLillo’s plays have premiered in London, Chicago, and Massachusetts. His novel Libra was adapted for the stage and directed by John Malkovich at the Steppenwolf Theater. Steppenwolf also commissioned “The Word for Snow” for the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Among DeLillo’s other awards and honors are the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the international literary prize awarded to a writer whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society, the first American to be so honored. In 2010, he received the PEN/Saul Bellow Prize for Achievement in American Fiction and in 2012 the Chicago Public Library’s Carl Sandburg Literary Award, both for lifetime achievement.

DeLillo lives in Westchester County, New York.