Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports. DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
Don DeLillo is een gevierd Amerikaans romancier en scenarist, erkend als een centrale figuur in de hedendaagse postmodernistische literatuur, waarbij bewerkingen van zijn werk het scherm bereiken.
Hij is vooral bekend om baanbrekende romans zoals White Noise en Underworld, evenals scenario's en bewerkingen waaronder Game 6 en Cosmopolis.
Zijn verhalen onderzoeken frequent de impact van massamedia, consumentencultuur, technologie, nucleaire angst en politieke geschiedenis in het moderne Amerika.