Don DeLillo's Funniest Novel Is A 1980 Hockey Sex Romp He Won't Acknowledge | Defector

"Beginning with Americana and continuing through End Zone, Great Jones Street, Ratner's Star, Players, and Running Dog, he had proven himself a shrewd, somber, grimly oracular chronicler of an uneasy period bookended by Nixon and Reagan, with Vietnam, Watergate, and other sundry grime in between."

"By the end of the decade, he would be in the midst of a three-book run- Libra, Mao II, and Underworld-that I and many others would argue is as formidable and ferocious a creative tear as any American writer has ever had. Together they comprise an epitaph for the American Century, and look knowingly at the decline that was already heavy on the horizon."

""For many of us, Don DeLillo has been the most interesting and talented of American post-modernist novelists (which is to say finally, I suppose, of current white man novelists...)," the late Fredric Jameson wrote in a review of The Names, (technically) DeLillo's first book of the 1980s."

Don DeLillo transitioned from advertising to become a significant American author during the 1970s, chronicling the Nixon-Reagan era through novels employing unconventional entry points like football and rock stars. By the 1980s, beginning with The Names, his work shifted toward deeper meditation on language and meaning. His subsequent trilogy—Libra, Mao II, and Underworld—represents a creative peak comparable to any American writer's achievement. These works function as an epitaph for the American Century, examining decline already visible on the horizon. The symbolic cover image of Underworld, featuring the World Trade Center, demonstrates how DeLillo's prescient fiction encouraged readers to find deeper meaning in contemporary events.

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