Novelist Don DeLillo to give Steloff lecture-reading
Don DeLillo, a major contemporary American novelist widely regarded as one of the most important writers of his generation, will deliver the annual Frances Steloff lecture at Skidmore College at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 14, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.
DeLillo has been praised for the panoramic range, historical detail, and stylistic brilliance of his work, as well as for his willingness to tackle the most complex and demanding contemporary issues. The New York Review of Books called DeLillo "one of the most original, intelligent, and visionary novelists now writing in America," and novelist Thomas Pynchon has said that "DeLillo has a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing."
The DeLillo event?a fiction reading followed by a question-and-answer session and book signing?is free and open to the public.
Since the early 1960s, when he published his first fiction, DeLillo has written short stories, plays, and more than a dozen novels, including White Noise (1985), Underworld (1997), and Libra (1988). His honors include a 1985 National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (1991), and the Jerusalem Prize (1999). In a recent poll of leading writers, The New York Times Book Review rated Underworld among the top three novels of the past 25 years, and the novel was awarded the 2000 William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years.
Inspired by a wide range of topics including but not limited to urban life, rock music, waste management, and people and events of recent history (including Lee Harvey Oswald and 9/11), DeLillo has written about the culture of materialism, mass media, the immigrant experience, urban life, academia, the government, the family, and contemporary Islamic terrorism. "I write to find out how much I know," DeLillo has said. "The act of writing for me is a concentrated form of thought."
Born in 1936 to immigrant Italian parents, DeLillo was raised Catholic in the Bronx, N.Y., and attended Fordham University with a major in communication arts. Not much of a childhood reader, he later enjoyed contemporary fiction and the works of William Faulkner and James Joyce. "It was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history," DeLillo has said. He has also said, "I think that more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, and jazz and Abstract Expressionism."
After a stint turning out advertising copy, DeLillo spent four years writing his first novel, Americana. Published in 1971, it enjoyed only modest critical success but convinced DeLillo that his life's work would be writing. Over the next 10 years, he published seven novels: End Zone, Great Jones Street, Ratner's Star, Players, Running Dog, Amazons (under the pseudonym of Cleo Birdwell), and The Names. Critical and popular success came with White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, and Underworld in 1997. Other books by DeLillo include Mao II (1991), The Body Artist (2001), Cosmopolis (2003), and Falling Man (2007). DeLillo has also written three plays.
A high point of the academic year, Skidmore's annual Steloff Lecture was established in 1967 by Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs who became a well-known patron of writers and founded the Gotham Book Mart in New York City. She endowed the series as a way to bring outstanding literary and artistic talent to the college. Previous Steloff speakers include Nadine Gordimer, Seamus Heaney, J.M. Coetzee, Saul Bellow, Mario Vargas Llosa, Katharine Anne Porter, Louise Gluck, Chinua Achebe, Susan Sontag, and Arthur Miller.