Prompt: Question: Tell me a bio of Nikole Hannah-Jones.

Nikole Hannah-Jones

<s>Nikole Hannah-Jones Nikole Sheri Hannah-Jones (born April 9, 1976) is an American investigative journalist, known for her coverage of civil rights in the United States. She joined "The New York Times" as a staff writer in April 2015, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 2020 for her work on "The 1619 Project". Hannah-Jones is the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism at the Howard University School of Communications, where she also founded the Center for Journalism and Democracy.</s><s>Early life. Hannah-Jones was born in Waterloo, Iowa, to father Milton Hannah, who is African-American, and mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is white and of Czech and English descent. Hannah-Jones is the second of three girls. She was raised Catholic. Hannah-Jones and her sister attended almost all-white schools as part of a voluntary program of desegregation busing. She attended Waterloo West High School, where she wrote for the high school newspaper and graduated in 1994. After high school, Hannah-Jones attended the University of Notre Dame where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in history and African-American studies in 1998. She graduated from the University of North Carolina

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Hussman School of Journalism and Media with a master's degree in 2003, where she was a Roy H. Park Fellow.</s><s>Career. In 2003, Hannah-Jones began her career covering education, which included the predominantly African American Durham Public Schools, for the Raleigh "News & Observer," a position she held for three years. In 2006, Hannah-Jones moved to Portland, Oregon, where she wrote for "The Oregonian" for six years. During this time her assignments included feature work, demographics, and then government and census beats. In 2007, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the 1965 Watts riots, Hannah-Jones wrote about the impact on the community of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also known as the Kerner Commission. From 2008 to 2009, Hannah-Jones received a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies which enabled her to travel to Cuba to study universal healthcare and Cuba's educational system under Raul Castro. In 2011, she joined the nonprofit news organization "ProPublica," which is based in New York City, where she covered civil rights and continued research she started in Oregon on redlining and in-depth investigative reporting on the lack of enforcement of the Fair Housing Act for minorities. Hannah-Jones also spent time in T

Nikole Hannah-Jones

uscaloosa, Alabama, where the decision in "Brown v. Board of Education" had little effect. Hannah-Jones was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021. In 2021, Hannah-Jones told CBS News that "All journalism is activism". In January 2022, Hannah Jones and teacher Sheritta Stokes launched the 1619 Freedom School in Waterloo Iowa, inspired by the 1960s Freedom Schools of the civil-rights movement. The program is a five day a week, 2 hour literacy enrichment for the Waterloo school district for grade-school students.</s><s>Career.:"The New York Times". In 2015, Hannah-Jones became a staff reporter for "The New York Times." Hannah-Jones has written about topics such as racial segregation, desegregation and resegregation in American schools and housing discrimination, and has spoken about these issues on national public radio broadcasts. She writes to discover and expose the systemic and institutional racism that she says are perpetuated by official laws and acts. Her work on racial inequalities has been particularly influential and is cited widely. Hannah-Jones reported on the school district where teenager Michael Brown had been shot, one of the "most segregated, impoverished districts in the entire state" of Missouri. Reviewer Laura Mos

Nikole Hannah-Jones

er of "Slate" praised her report on school resegregation, which showed how educational inequality may have been a factor in the death of Brown. Hannah-Jones was a 2017 Emerson Fellow at the New America Foundation, where she worked on a book on school segregation. The book, "The Problem We All Live With", is due out in June 2020 from Chris Jackson's One World imprint at Random House. Hannah-Jones is a 2017 recipient of the MacArthur Foundation fellowship. The award cited her "Chronicling the persistence of racial segregation in American society, particularly in education, and reshaping national conversations around education reform."</s><s>Career.:"The New York Times".:1619 Project. In 2019, Hannah-Jones launched a project to fundamentally change the way slavery in the United States was viewed, timed for the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first enslaved Africans in Virginia. Hannah-Jones produced a series of articles for a special issue of "The New York Times Magazine" titled The 1619 Project. The ongoing initiative began August 14, 2019, and "aims to reframe the country's history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative." The project featured essays by a combination of staff

Nikole Hannah-Jones

writers and academics including Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse, Harvard-trained lawyer Bryan Stevenson, Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, and SUNY historian Anne Bailey. In the opening essay, Hannah-Jones wrote "No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed." The project also included poems, short fiction, and a photo essay. Originally conceived of as a special issue, it was soon turned into a full-fledged project, including a special broadsheet section in the newspaper, live events, and a multi-episode podcast series. In 2020, Hannah-Jones won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her work on the 1619 Project. The award cited her "sweeping, provocative and personal essay for the ground-breaking 1619 Project, which seeks to place the enslavement of Africans at the center of America's story, prompting public conversation about the nation's founding and evolution." Her paper was criticized by historians Gordon S. Wood and Leslie M. Harris, specifically for asserting that "one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery." The article was "clarified" in March 2020 to read "for some of the colonists". There was also

Nikole Hannah-Jones

debate around whether the project suggested the nation was founded in 1619 with the arrival of enslaved Africans rather than in 1776 with the Declaration of Independence. Speaking to "New York Times" opinion writer Bret Stephens, Hannah-Jones said the suggestion of considering 1619 as a jumping-off point for interpreting US history had always been so self-evidently metaphorical that it went without saying. New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute named the 1619 Project as one of the 10 greatest works of journalism in the decade from 2010 to 2019. In 2022 the Hannah-Jones was nominated at the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction and was recognized with the Social Justice Impact Award.</s><s>Career.:University of North Carolina. In April 2021, the University of North Carolina announced Hannah-Jones would join the Hussman School of Journalism and Media in July 2021 as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. Following criticism, particularly from conservative groups who expressed disagreement with the 1619 Project and questioned Hannah-Jones's credentials, the University Board of Trustees, presented with the tenure committee's recommendation to approve her application for tenure, instead took no action. Unable to offer tenure without approval by its trustees, UNC announced they would instead offer a fixed five-

Nikole Hannah-Jones

year contract with an option for tenure review—terms to which Hannah-Jones agreed. Outraged, more than 40 Hussman faculty members signed a statement criticizing the board's inaction, noting that the previous two Knight Chairs were given tenure and claiming that UNC "unfairly moves the goal posts" by not offering Hannah-Jones the same. The school's Black Caucus also condemned the terms of her contract, and students joined faculty in protests. Hannah-Jones stated, "It's pretty clear that my tenure was not taken up because of political opposition, because of discriminatory views against my viewpoint and, I believe, [because of] my race and my gender."</s><s>Career.:Howard University. Hannah-Jones refused the position at North Carolina and decided to accept a tenured position at Howard University instead, where she will be the inaugural Knight Chair in Race and Journalism. Hannah-Jones said, "Once the news broke and I started to see the extent of the political interference, particularly the reporting on Walter Hussman, it became really clear to me that I just could not work at a school named after Walter Hussman. To be a person who has stood for what I stand for and have any integrity whatsoever, I just couldn't see how I could do that."

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Ta-Nehisi Coates will join Hannah-Jones at Howard as the Sterling Brown Chair in the English Department. Jones also brings $20 million to Howard to support her work there, $5 million each from the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation and an anonymous donor.</s><s>Controversies and criticism.</s><s>Controversies and criticism.:Criticism of the 1619 Project. Five historians wrote to "The New York Times Magazine" to ask the creators of its 1619 Project to issue corrections, including for Hannah-Jones's assertions on the American Revolution and on Lincoln. The correction request was signed by Victoria Bynum of Texas State University, James M. McPherson and Sean Wilentz of Princeton University, James Oakes of the City University of New York, and Gordon S. Wood of Brown University. Historian Leslie M. Harris, who was consulted for the Project, wrote in "Politico" that she had warned that the idea that the American Revolution was fought to protect slavery was inaccurate, and that the "Times" made avoidable mistakes. In the May 2022 issue of the libertarian magazine "Reason", reporter Phillip W. Magness criticized the 1619 Project as "junk history." Magness contrasted the

Nikole Hannah-Jones

present work of Hannah-Jones with past work at historical understanding of slavery by prominent African-Americans such as Zora Neale Hurston. Magness stated:</s><s>Controversies and criticism.:"Free Beacon" reporter. A "Washington Free Beacon" reporter highlighted a tweet from Hannah-Jones from May 2016 in which she quoted someone using a racial slur. After being asked for comment, Hannah-Jones posted the reporter's inquiry, which contained his work phone number, on Twitter. In an interview with "Slate", Hannah-Jones said, "I didn't realize I was tweeting out his phone number, and when someone mentioned it, I should have deleted it. So absolutely. I did not intend to do that, and I wish that I hadn't."</s><s>Controversies and criticism.:Fireworks tweet. In June 2020, Jones apologized for retweeting a conspiracy theory claiming that fireworks were being set off by "government agents" to dampen the Black Lives Matter movement.</s><s>Controversies and criticism.:Middlesex School. In October 2021, the Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts rescinded a speaking invitation to Nikole Hannah-Jones for February 2022, claiming "the 'noise' associated with having Nikole as the speaker would

Nikole Hannah-Jones

take away from the overall experience."</s><s>Controversies and criticism.:Comments on Europe and Ukraine. In a February 2022 tweet, Hannah-Jones stated that Europe is "not a continent by definition" alleging that there is "a geopolitical fiction to separate it from Asia" (a reference to the fact that Eurasia, the largest continental landmass in the world, is geologically a single continent rather than two separate continents). She referred to the alarm over Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its people, who "appear white" as a racial "dog whistle". Several Twitter users rebuked and mocked Hannah-Jones for denying that Europe is a continent and for applying systemic racism to the invasion of Ukraine. Anthropologist Peter W. Wood called her comments "triumphant silliness" which came down to her desire "to find racism at the root of whatever happens". Shadi Hamid, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said it was "absurd" for Hannah-Jones to claim that Europe isn't a continent and also called her comments about Ukraine "pretty insensitive considering Ukrainians are dying." She later clarified that "We should care about Ukraine," but not because "it is European, or the people appear white, or they are 'civilized' and not

Nikole Hannah-Jones

'impoverished.'"</s><s>Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. In early 2015, Nikole Hannah-Jones, along with Ron Nixon, Corey Johnson, and Topher Sanders, began dreaming of creating the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting. This organization was launched in Memphis, Tennessee, in 2016, with the purpose of promoting investigative journalism, which is the least common type of reporting. Following in the footsteps of Ida B. Wells, this society encourages minority journalists to expose injustices perpetuated by the government and defend people who are susceptible to being taken advantage of. This organization was created with support from the Open Society Foundations, Ford Foundation, and CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.</s><s>Personal life. Hannah-Jones lives in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn with her husband, Faraji Hannah-Jones (both shared their last names when they married November 1, 2003), and their daughter.</s><s>Awards. - 2007, 2008, 2010: Society of Professional Journalists, Pacific Northwest, Excellence in Journalism Award - 2012: Gannett Foundation Innovation in Watchdog Journalism Award - 2013: Sidney Award - 2013: Columbia University, Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award - 2015: National Awards for Education Reporting,

Nikole Hannah-Jones

first prize, beat reporting - 2015: National Association of Black Journalists, Journalist of the Year - 2015: National Magazine Award finalist, public interest - 2015: Education Writers Association, Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting - 2015: Emerson College President's Award for Civic Leadership - 2015: The Root 100 - 2016: George Polk Award, radio reporting - 2017: MacArthur Foundation Fellowship - 2017: National Magazine Award winner, public interest - 2019: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Distinguished Alumna Award - 2020: 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary - 2021: "Time" magazine 100 - 2022:NAACP Image Award Social Justice Impact Award - 2022: NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction for "The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story"</s><s>Publications. - Hannah-Jones, Nikole. "Fields of Lost Dreams: How Race and Racism Have Contributed to the Overrepresentation of Blacks in the Iowa Prison System". 2003. Print. - Hannah-Jones, Nikole. "Living Apart". ProPublica, 2012. Internet resource. - Hannah-Jones, Nikole. "Segregation Now: Investigating America's Racial Divide". 2014. Print. - Hannah-Jones,

Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nikole, and Allyson Johnson. "The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery". Minneapolis, Minn: Highbridge Audio, 2018. Internet resource. - Hannah-Jones, Nikole, Mary Elliott, Jazmine Hughes, and Jake Silverstein. "The 1619 Project: New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019". 2019. Print. - Hannah-Jones, Nikole. "The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story". 2021. Print. - Hannah-Jones, Nikole, Renée Watson, and Nikkolas Smith. "The 1619 Project – Born on the Water". 2021. Print.</s>


Prompt: Question: Tell me a bio of Don DeLillo.

Don DeLillo

<s>Don DeLillo 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, sports, the complexities of language, performance art, the Cold War, mathematics, the advent of the digital age, politics, economics, and global terrorism. DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of "White Noise" brought him widespread recognition and won him the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with "Libra", a bestseller. DeLillo has twice been a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction finalist (for "Mao II" in 1992 and for "Underworld" in 1998), won the PEN/Faulkner Award for "Mao II" in 1992, won the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, was granted the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and won the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013. DeLillo had described his fiction as concerned with "living in dangerous times", and in a 2005 interview he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state,

Don DeLillo

and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."</s><s>Early life and influences. DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in New York City and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family with ties to Molise, Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx not far from Arthur Avenue.{{Cite news }} Reflecting on his childhood in the Bronx, DeLillo said he was "always out in the street. As a little boy I whiled away most of my time pretending to be a baseball announcer on the radio. I could think up games for hours at a time. There were eleven of us in a small house, but the close quarters were never a problem. I didn't know things any other way. We always spoke English and Italian all mixed up together. My grandmother, who lived in America for fifty years, never learned English." As a teenager, DeLillo was not interested in writing until he took a summer job as a parking attendant, where the hours spent waiting and watching over vehicles led to a lifelong reading habit. Reflecting on this period, in a 2010 interview, he stated, "I had a

Don DeLillo

personal golden age of reading in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time". Among the writers DeLillo read and was inspired by in this period were James Joyce, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, and Ernest Hemingway, who was a major influence on DeLillo's earliest attempts at writing in his late teens. As well as the influence of modernist fiction, DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music—"guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis"—and postwar cinema: "Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut, and then in the '70s came the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: Kubrick, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese and so on. I don't know how they may have affected the way I write, but I do have a visual sense." Of the influence of film, particularly European cinema, on his work, DeLillo has said, "European and Asian cinemas of the 1960s shaped the way I think and feel about things. At that time I was living in New York, I didn't have much money, didn't have much work, I was

Don DeLillo

living in one room...I was a man in a small room. And I went to the movies a lot, watching Bergman, Antonioni, Godard. When I was little, in the Bronx, I didn't go to the cinema, and I didn't think of the American films I saw as works of art. Perhaps, in an indirect way, cinema allowed me to become a writer." He also credits his parents' leniency and acceptance of his desire to write for encouraging him to pursue a literary career: "They ultimately trusted me to follow the course I'd chosen. This is something that happens if you're the eldest son in an Italian family: You get a certain leeway, and it worked in my case." After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1954 and from Fordham University in the Bronx with a bachelor's degree in communication arts in 1958, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he could not get one in publishing. He worked for five years as a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather on Fifth Avenue, writing image ads for Sears Roebuck among others, working on "Print ads, very undistinguished accounts...I hadn't made the leap to television. I was just getting good at it when

Don DeLillo

I left, in 1964." DeLillo published his first short story in 1960—"The River Jordan", in "Epoch", Cornell University's literary magazine—and began to work on his first novel in 1966. Of the beginning of his writing career, DeLillo has said, "I did some short stories at that time but very infrequently. I quit my job just to quit. I didn't quit my job to write fiction. I just didn't want to work anymore."{{cite news }} Reflecting in 1993 on his relatively late start in writing novels, DeLillo said, "I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn't ready. First, I lacked ambition. I may have had novels in my head but very little on paper and no personal goals, no burning desire to achieve some end. Second, I didn't have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this."</s><s>Works.</s><s>Works.:1970s. DeLillo's inaugural decade of novel writing has been his most productive to date, resulting in the writing and publication of six novels between 1971 and 1978. He resigned from the advertising industry in 1964, moved into a modest apartment near the Queens–Midtown Tunnel ("

Don DeLillo

It wasn't Paris in the 1920s, but I was happy"), and began work on his first novel. Of the early days of his writing career, he remarked: "I lived in a very minimal kind of way. My telephone would be $4.20 every month. I was paying a rent of sixty dollars a month. And I was becoming a writer. So in one sense, I was ignoring the movements of the time." His first novel, "Americana", was written over four years and finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. "Americana" concerned "a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture". DeLillo revised the novel in 1989 for paperback reprinting. Reflecting on the novel later in his career, he said, "I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published." Later still, DeLillo continued to feel a degree of surprise that "Americana" was published: "I was working on my first novel, "Americ

Don DeLillo

ana", for two years before I ever realized that I could be a writer [...] I had absolutely no assurance that this book would be published because I knew that there were elements that I simply didn't know how to improve at that point. So I wrote for another two years and finished the novel. It wasn't all that difficult to find a publisher, to my astonishment. I didn't have a representative. I didn't know anything about publishing. But an editor at Houghton Mifflin read the manuscript and decided that this was worth pursuing." "Americana" was followed in rapid succession by the American college football/nuclear war black comedy "End Zone" (1972)—written under the working titles "The Self-Erasing Word" and "Modes of Disaster Technology"—and the rock and roll satire "Great Jones Street" (1973), which DeLillo later felt was "one of the books I wish I'd done differently. It should be tighter, and probably a little funnier." He married Barbara Bennett, a former banker turned landscape designer, in 1975. DeLillo's fourth novel, "Ratner's Star" (1976)—which according to DeLillo is "structure[d] [...] on the writings of Lewis Carroll, in particular "Alice

Don DeLillo

in Wonderland" and "Alice Through the Looking Glass"—took two years to write and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of Thomas Pynchon. This "conceptual monster", as DeLillo scholar Tom LeClair has called it, is "the picaresque story of a 14-year-old math genius who joins an international consortium of mad scientists decoding an alien message." DeLillo has said it was both one of the most difficult books for him to write and his personal favorite of his novels. Following this early attempt at a major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. "Players" (1977), originally conceived as "based on what could be called the intimacy of language—what people who live together really sound like", concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as the husband gets involved with a cell of domestic terrorists. Its 1978 successor, "Running Dog" (1978), written in four months, was a thriller about a hunt for a celluloid reel of Hitler's sexual exploits. Of "Running Dog", DeLillo remarked, "What I was really getting at in "Running Dog" was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad

Don DeLillo

attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don't care about this so much anyway. This was something I felt characterized our lives at the time the book was written in the mid to late seventies. I think this was part of American consciousness then." In 1978, DeLillo was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which he used to fund a trip around the Middle East before settling in Greece, where he wrote his next novels, "Amazons" and "The Names". Of his first six novels and his rapid writing turnover later in his career, DeLillo said, "I wasn't learning to slow down and examine what I was doing more closely. I don't have regrets about that work, but I do think that if I had been a bit less hasty in starting each new book, I might have produced somewhat better work in the 1970s. My first novel took so long and was such an effort that once I was free of it, I almost became carefree in a sense and moved right through the decade, stopping, in a way, only at "Ratner's Star" (1976), which was an enormous challenge for me and probably a bigger challenge for the reader. But I slowed down in the 1980

Don DeLillo

s and '90s." DeLillo has also acknowledged some of the weaknesses of his 1970s works, reflecting in 2007: "I knew I wasn't doing utterly serious work, let me put it that way."</s><s>Works.:1980s. The beginning of the 1980s saw the most unusual and uncharacteristic publication in DeLillo's career. The sports novel "Amazons", a mock memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, is a far more lighthearted and more evidently commercial novel than his previous and subsequent ones. DeLillo published the novel under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell, and later requested publishers compiling a bibliography for a reprint of a later novel to expunge the novel from their lists. While DeLillo was living in Greece, he took three years to write "The Names" (1982), a complex thriller about "a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East". While lauded by an increasing number of literary critics, DeLillo was still relatively unknown outside small academic circles and did not reach a wide readership with this novel. Also in 1982, DeLillo finally broke his self-imposed ban on media coverage by giving his first major interview to Tom LeClair, who had first tracked

Don DeLillo

DeLillo down for an interview while he was in Greece in 1979. On that occasion, DeLillo handed LeClair a business card with his name printed on it and beneath that the message "I don't want to talk about it." With the 1985 publication of his eighth novel, "White Noise", DeLillo rapidly became a noted and respected novelist. "White Noise" was arguably a major breakthrough both commercially and artistically for DeLillo, earning him a National Book Award for Fiction and a place in the canon of contemporary postmodern novelists. DeLillo remained as detached as ever from his growing reputation: when called upon to give an acceptance speech for the award, he simply said, "I'm sorry I couldn't be here tonight, but I thank you all for coming," and then sat down. "White Noise"'s influence can be seen in the writing of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of the novel). Among the 39 proposed titles for the novel were "All Souls", "Ultrasonic", "The American Book of the Dead", "Psychic Data" and "Mein Kampf". In

Don DeLillo

2005 DeLillo said "White Noise" was a fine choice, adding, "Once a title is affixed to a book, it becomes as indelible as a sentence or a paragraph." DeLillo followed "White Noise" with "Libra" (1988), a speculative fictionalized life of Lee Harvey Oswald up to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy. DeLillo undertook a vast research project, which included reading at least half of the Warren Commission report (which DeLillo called "the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel. This is the one document that captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event, despite the fact that it omits about a ton and a half of material.") Written with the working titles "American Blood" and "Texas School Book", "Libra" became an international bestseller, one of five finalists for the National Book Award, and the winner of the next year's "Irish Times" Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. The novel also elicited fierce critical division, with some critics praising DeLillo's take on the Kennedy assassination while others decried it. George Will, in the "Washington Post", declared the book an affront to America and "an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship".

Don DeLillo

DeLillo responded "I don't take it seriously, but being called a 'bad citizen' is a compliment to a novelist, at least to my mind. That's exactly what we ought to do. We ought to be bad citizens. We ought to, in the sense that we're writing against what power represents, and often what government represents, and what the corporation dictates, and what consumer consciousness has come to mean. In that sense, if we're bad citizens, we're doing our job." In the same interview DeLillo rejected Will's claim that DeLillo blames America for Lee Harvey Oswald, countering that he instead blamed America for George Will. DeLillo has frequently reflected on the significance of the Kennedy assassination to not only his own work but American culture and history as a whole, remarking in 2005, "November 22nd, 1963, marked the real beginning of the 1960s. It was the beginning of a series of catastrophes: political assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the denial of Civil Rights and the revolts that occasioned, youth revolt in American cities, right up to Watergate. When I was starting out as a writer it seemed to me that a large part of the material you could find in my novels—this sense of fatality,

Don DeLillo

of widespread suspicion, of mistrust—came from the assassination of JFK."</s><s>Works.:1990s. DeLillo's concerns about the position of the novelist and the novel in a media- and terrorist-dominated society were made clear in his next novel, "Mao II" (1991). Clearly influenced by the events surrounding the fatwa placed on the author Salman Rushdie and the intrusion of the press into the life of the writer J. D. Salinger, "Mao II" earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, John Banville and Thomas Pynchon. He earned a PEN/Faulkner Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist nomination for "Mao II" in 1991 and 1992, respectively. Following "Mao II", DeLillo went underground and spent several years writing and researching his 11th novel. Aside from the publication of a folio short story, "Pafko at the Wall", in a 1992 issue of "Harper's Magazine", and one short story in 1995, little was seen or heard of him for a number of years. He told "The" "Paris Review": “Sometime in late 1991, I started writing something new and didn’t know what it would be

Don DeLillo

– a novel, a short story, a long story. It was simply a piece of writing, and it gave me more pleasure than any other writing I’ve done. It turned into a novella, "Pafko at the Wall", and it appeared in "Harper’s" about a year after I started it. At some point I decided I wasn’t finished with the piece. I was sending signals into space and getting echoes back, like a dolphin or a bat. So the piece, slightly altered, is now the prologue to a novel-in-progress, which will have a different title. And the pleasure has long since faded into the slogging reality of the no man’s land of the long novel. But I’m still hearing the echoes.” This would become the first chapter of his epic Cold War history "Underworld". The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic Martin Amis saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer."{{cite news }} Harold Bloom called it "the culmination of what Don can do." Bloom named DeLillo as one of the four greatest living American novelists, along with Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Thomas

Don DeLillo

Pynchon, naming their respective masterpieces as "Blood Meridian", "Sabbath's Theater" and "American Pastoral", "The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow" and "Mason & Dixon", and "Underworld". "Underworld" went on to become DeLillo's most acclaimed novel to date, achieving mainstream success and earning nominations for the National Book Award and the "New York Times" Best Books of the Year in 1997, and a second Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination in 1998. The novel won the 1998 American Book Award, and both the William Dean Howells Medal and Riccardo Bacchelli International Award in 2000. It was a runner-up in the 2006 "New York Times"' survey of the best American fiction of the last 25 years. "White Noise" and "Libra" were also recognized by the anonymous jury of contemporary writers. DeLillo later expressed surprise at "Underworld"'s success. In 2007, he remarked: "When I finished with "Underworld", I didn't really have any all-too-great hopes, to be honest. It's some pretty complicated stuff: 800 pages, more than 100 different characters—who's going to be interested in that?" After rereading it in

Don DeLillo

2010, over ten years after its publication, DeLillo said that rereading it "made me wonder whether I would be capable of that kind of writing now—the range and scope of it. There are certain parts of the book where the exuberance, the extravagance, I don't know, the overindulgence...There are city scenes in New York that seem to transcend reality in a certain way."</s><s>Works.:2000s. Although they have received some acclaim in places, DeLillo's post-"Underworld" novels have been often viewed by critics as "disappointing and slight, especially when held up against his earlier, big-canvas epics", marking a shift "away from sweeping, era-defining novels" such as "White Noise", "Libra" and "Underworld" to a more "spare and oblique" style, characterized by "decreased length, the decommissioning of plot machinery and the steep deceleration of narrative time". DeLillo has said of this shift to shorter novels, "If a longer novel announces itself, I'll write it. A novel creates its own structure and develops its own terms. I tend to follow. And I never try to stretch what I sense is

Don DeLillo

a compact book." In a March 2010 interview, it was reported that DeLillo's deliberate stylistic shift had been informed by his having recently reread several slim but seminal European novels, including Albert Camus's "The Stranger", Peter Handke's "The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick", and Max Frisch's "Man in the Holocene". After the publication and extensive publicity drive for "Underworld", DeLillo once again retreated from the spotlight to write his 12th novel, surfacing with "The Body Artist" in 2001. The novel has many established DeLillo preoccupations, particularly its interest in performance art and domestic privacies in relation to the wider scope of events. But it is very different in style and tone from the epic history of "Underworld", and met with mixed critical reception. DeLillo followed "The Body Artist" with 2003's "Cosmopolis", a modern reinterpretation of James Joyce's "Ulysses" transposed to New York around the time of the collapse of the dot-com bubble in 2000. This novel was met at the time with a largely negative reception from critics, with several high-profile critics and novelists—notably John Updike—voicing their objections to its style and

Don DeLillo

tone. When asked in 2005 how he felt about the novel's mixed reception compared to the broader positive consensus afforded to "Underworld", DeLillo remarked: "I try to stay detached from that aspect of my work as a writer. I didn't read any reviews or articles. Maybe it [the negative reception] was connected to September 11. I'd almost finished writing the book when the attacks took place, and so they couldn't have had any influence on the book's conception, nor on its writing. Perhaps for certain readers this upset their expectations." Critical opinions have since been revised, the novel latterly being seen as prescient for its focus on the flaws and weaknesses of the international financial system and cybercapital. DeLillo's papers were acquired in 2004 by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, reputedly for "half a million dollars". There are "[one] hundred and twenty-five boxes" of DeLillo materials, including various drafts and correspondence. Of his decision to donate his papers to the Ransom Center, DeLillo has said: "I ran out of space and also felt, as one does at a certain age, that I was running out of time. I didn't want to leave behind an enormous mess

Don DeLillo

of papers for family members to deal with. Of course, I've since produced more paper—novel, play, essay, etc.—and so the cycle begins again." DeLillo published his final novel of the decade, "Falling Man", in 2007. The novel concerns the impact on one family of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, "an intimate story which is encompassed by a global event". DeLillo said he originally "didn't ever want to write a novel about 9/11" and "had an idea for a different book" he had "been working on for half a year" in 2004 when he came up with the idea for the novel, beginning work on it following the reelection of George W. Bush that November. Although highly anticipated and eagerly awaited by critics, who felt that DeLillo was one of the contemporary writers best equipped to tackle the events of 9/11 in novelistic form, the novel met with a mixed critical reception and garnered no major literary awards or nominations. DeLillo remained unconcerned by this relative lack of critical acclaim, remarking in 2010, "In the 1970s, when I started writing novels, I was a figure in the margins, and that's where I belonged. If

Don DeLillo

I'm headed back that way, that's fine with me because that's always where I felt I belonged. Things changed for me in the 1980s and 1990s, but I've always preferred to be somewhere in the corner of a room, observing." On July 24, 2009, "Entertainment Weekly" announced that David Cronenberg would adapt "Cosmopolis" for the screen, with "a view to eventually direct." "Cosmopolis", eventually released in 2012, became the first direct adaptation for the screen of a DeLillo novel, although both "Libra" and "Underworld" had previously been optioned for screen treatments. There were discussions about adapting "End Zone", and DeLillo has written an original screenplay for the film "Game 6". DeLillo ended the decade by making an unexpected appearance at a PEN event on the steps of the New York City Public Library in support of Chinese dissident writer Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for "inciting subversion of state power" on December 31, 2009.</s><s>Works.:2010s. DeLillo published "Point Omega", his 15th novel, in February 2010. According to DeLillo, the novel considers an idea from "the writing of the Jesuit thinker and

Don DeLillo

paleontologist [Pierre] Teilhard de Chardin." The Omega Point of the title "[is] the possible idea that human consciousness is reaching a point of exhaustion and that what comes next may be either a paroxysm or something enormously sublime and unenvisionable." "Point Omega" is DeLillo's shortest novel to date, and he has said it could be considered a companion piece to "The Body Artist": "In its reflections on time and loss, this may be a philosophical novel and maybe, considering its themes, the book shares a place in my work with "The Body Artist", another novel of abbreviated length." Reviews were polarized, with some saying the novel was a return to form and innovative, while others complained about its brevity and lack of plot and engaging characters. Upon its initial release, "Point Omega" spent one week on "The New York Times Best Seller list", peaking at No. 35 on the extended version of the list during its one-week stay on the list. In a January 29, 2010, interview with "The Wall Street Journal", DeLillo discussed at great length "Point Omega", his views of writing, and his plans for the future. When asked why his recent novels had been shorter, DeL

Don DeLillo

illo replied, "Each book tells me what it wants or what it is, and I'd be perfectly content to write another long novel. It just has to happen." While DeLillo is open to the idea of returning to the form of the long novel, the interview also revealed that he had no interest in doing as many of his literary contemporaries have done and writing a memoir. DeLillo also made some observations on the state of literature and the challenges facing young writers: It's tougher to be a young writer today than when I was a young writer. I don't think my first novel would have been published today as I submitted it. I don't think an editor would have read 50 pages of it. It was very overdone and shaggy, but two young editors saw something that seemed worth pursuing and eventually we all did some work on the book and it was published. I don't think publishers have that kind of tolerance these days, and I guess possibly as a result, more writers go to writing class now than then. I think first, fiction, and second, novels, are much more refined in terms of language, but they may tend to be too well behaved, almost in response to the narrower market. In a February 21, 2010, interview with "

Don DeLillo

The Times", DeLillo reaffirmed his belief in the validity and importance of the novel in a technology- and media-driven age, offering a more optimistic opinion of the future of the novel than his contemporary Philip Roth had done in a recent interview: It is the form that allows a writer the greatest opportunity to explore human experience...For that reason, reading a novel is potentially a significant act. Because there are so many varieties of human experience, so many kinds of interaction between humans, and so many ways of creating patterns in the novel that can't be created in a short story, a play, a poem or a movie. The novel, simply, offers more opportunities for a reader to understand the world better, including the world of artistic creation. That sounds pretty grand, but I think it's true. DeLillo received two further significant literary awards in 2010: the St. Louis Literary Award for his entire body of work to date on October 21, 2010 (previous recipients include Salman Rushdie, E.L. Doctorow, John Updike, William Gass, Joyce Carol Oates, Joan Didion and Tennessee Williams); and his second PEN Award, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, on October 13, 2010

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. DeLillo's first collection of short stories, "The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories", covering short stories published between 1979 and 2011, was published in November 2011. It received favorable reviews and was a finalist for both the 2012 Story Prize award and the 2012 PEN/Faulkner award for Fiction, as well as being longlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. New York Times Book Review contributor Liesl Schillinger praised it, saying, "DeLillo packs fertile ruminations and potent consolation into each of these rich, dense, concentrated stories." DeLillo received the 2012 Carl Sandburg Literary Award on October 17, 2012, on the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The prize is "presented annually to an acclaimed author in recognition of outstanding contributions to the literary world and honors a significant work or body of work that has enhanced the public's awareness of the written word." On January 29, 2013, "Variety" announced that Luca Guadagnino would direct an adaptation of "The Body Artist" called "Body Art". On April 26, 2013, it was announced that DeLillo had received the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction (formerly the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for

Don DeLillo

Fiction), with the presentation of the award due to take place during the 2013 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 21–22, 2013. The prize honors "an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something about the American experience." In a statement issued in response to the award, DeLillo said, "When I received news of this award, my first thoughts were of my mother and father, who came to this country the hard way, as young people confronting a new language and culture. In a significant sense, the Library of Congress Prize is the culmination of their efforts and a tribute to their memory." In November 2012, DeLillo revealed that he was at work on a new novel, his 16th, and that "the [main] character spends a lot of time watching file footage on a wide screen, images of a disaster." In August 2015, DeLillo's US publishers Simon and Schuster announced that the novel, "Zero K", would be published in May 2016. The advanced blurb for the novel is as follows: Jeffrey Lock

Don DeLillo

hart's father, Ross, is a George Soros-like billionaire now in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a deeply remote and secret compound where death is controlled and bodies are preserved until a future moment when medicine and technology can reawaken them. Jeffrey joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body. Ross Lockhart is not driven by the hope for immortality, for power and wealth beyond the grave. He is driven by love for his wife, for Artis, without whom he feels life is not worth living. It is that which compels him to submit to death long before his time. Jeffrey heartily disapproves. He is committed to living, to "the mingled astonishments of our time, here, on earth. "Thus begins an emotionally resonant novel that weighs the darkness of the world—terrorism, floods, fires, famine, death—against the beauty of everyday life; love, awe, "the intimate touch of earth and sun." Brilliantly observed and infused with humor, Don Delillo's "Zero K" is an acute observation about the fragility and meaning of life, about

Don DeLillo

embracing our family, this world, our language, and our humanity. In November 2015, DeLillo received the 2015 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters at the 66th National Book Awards Ceremony. The ceremony was held on November 8 in New York City, and he was presented his award by Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan, a writer profoundly influenced by DeLillo's work. In his acceptance speech, DeLillo reflected upon his career as a reader as well as a writer, recalling examining his personal book collection and feeling a profound sense of personal connection to literature: "Here I'm not the writer at all, I'm a grateful reader. When I look at my bookshelves I find myself gazing like a museum-goer." In February 2016, DeLillo was the guest of honor at an academic conference dedicated to his work, "Don DeLillo: Fiction Rescues History", a three-day event at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. Speaking to "The Guardian" in November 2018, DeLillo revealed work on a new novel, his 17th, "set three years in the future. But I'm not trying to imagine the future in the usual terms. I'm trying to imagine what has been torn apart and what can be

Don DeLillo

put back together, and I don't know the answer. I hope I can arrive at an answer through writing the fiction."</s><s>Works.:2020s. DeLillo's 17th novel, "The Silence", was published by Scribner in October 2020. In February 2021, producer Uri Singer acquired the rights to the novel; later the same year, reports emerged that the playwright Jez Butterworth was planning to adapt "The Silence" for the screen. The first Library of America volume of DeLillo's writings is scheduled for publication in October 2022. The volume, titled "Don DeLillo: Three Novels of the 1980s", collects the three major works DeLillo published under his own name during the 1980s: "The Names" (1982), "White Noise" (1985), and "Libra" (1988). The novels will have new prefaces written by DeLillo for the collection, and the DeLillo scholar Mark Osteen will serve as editor. DeLillo lives near New York City in the suburb of Bronxville with his wife, Barbara Bennett.</s><s>Plays. Since 1979, in addition to his novels and occasional essays, DeLillo has been active as a playwright. To date, DeLillo has written five major plays: "The

Don DeLillo

Engineer of Moonlight" (1979), "The Day Room" (1986), "Valparaiso" (1999), "Love Lies Bleeding" (2006), and, most recently, "The Word For Snow" (2007). Stage adaptations have also been written for DeLillo's novels "Libra" and "Mao II". Of his work as a playwright, DeLillo has said that he feels his plays are not influenced by the same writers as his novels: "I'm not sure who influenced me [as a playwright]. I've seen some reviews that mention Beckett and Pinter, but I don't know what to say about that. I don't feel it myself."</s><s>Themes and criticism. DeLillo's work displays elements of both modernism and postmodernism. (Though it is worth noting that DeLillo himself claims not to know if his work is postmodern: "It is not [postmodern]. I'm the last guy to ask. If I had to classify myself, it would be in the long line of modernists, from James Joyce through William Faulkner and so on. That has always been my model.") He has said the primary influences on his work and development are "abstract expressionism, foreign

Don DeLillo

films, and jazz."{{cite book In several of his novels, DeLillo explores the idea of the increasing visibility and effectiveness of terrorists as societal actors and, consequently, the displacement of what he views to be artists', and particularly novelists', traditional role in facilitating social discourse ("Players", "Mao II", "Falling Man"). Another perpetual theme in DeLillo's books is the saturation of mass media and its role in forming simulacra, resulting in the removal of an event from its context and the consequent draining of meaning (see the highway shooter in "Underworld", the televised disasters longed for in "White Noise", the planes in "Falling Man", the evolving story of the interviewee in "Valparaiso"). The psychology of crowds and the capitulation of individuals to group identity is a theme DeLillo examines in several of his novels, especially in the prologue to "Underworld", "Mao II", and "Falling Man". In a 1993 interview with Maria Nadotti, DeLillo explained DeLillo's contemporary Joyce Carol Oates called him "a man of frightening perception." Many younger English-language authors such as Bret Easton Ellis, Jonathan Franzen, and David Foster Wallace have cited DeLillo as an influence. Literary

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critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy, though he questions the classification of DeLillo as a "postmodern novelist." Asked if he approves of this designation, DeLillo has responded: "I don't react. But I'd prefer not to be labeled. I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist."{{cite book Critics of DeLillo argue that his novels are overly stylized and intellectually shallow. In James Wood's review of Zadie Smith's 2000 novel "White Teeth", he dismissed the work of authors like DeLillo, Wallace, and Smith as "hysterical realism". Bruce Bawer famously condemned DeLillo's novels insisting they weren't actually novels at all but "tracts, designed to batter us, again and again, with a single idea: that life in America today is boring, benumbing, dehumanized...It's better, DeLillo seems to say in one novel after another, to be a marauding murderous maniac – and therefore a "human" – than to sit still for America as it is, with its air conditioners, assembly lines, television sets, supermarkets, synthetic fabrics

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, and credit cards." B. R. Myers devoted an entire chapter ("Edgy Prose") of "A Reader's Manifesto", his 2002 critique of recent American literary fiction, to dissecting passages from DeLillo's books and arguing that they're banal ideas badly written. Most critics, however, regard DeLillo as a gifted stylist; reviewing "Mao II," Michiko Kautani said that "The writing is dazzling; the images, so radioactive they glow afterward in our minds."</s><s>References in popular culture.</s><s>References in popular culture.:In film. - In "The Proposal" (2009), the Canadian-born editor in chief of a New York publisher risks deportation to meet DeLillo at the Frankfurt Book Fair. - In "The Matrix Resurrections", the character Thomas Anderson is in a bathroom stall reading the DeLillo quote: "It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams"</s><s>References in popular culture.:In music. - Band names - The band The Airborne Toxic Event takes its name from a chemical gas leak of the same name in DeLillo's "White Noise". - Lyrics - Rhett Miller references "Libra" in his song "World Inside the World

Don DeLillo

", saying: "I read it in DeLillo, like he'd written it for me". (The phrase "There is a world inside the world" appears several times in the book.) - Bright Eyes begins their song "Gold Mine Gutted" from "Digital Ash in a Digital Urn" with: "It was Don DeLillo, whiskey neat, and a blinking midnight clock. Speakers on the TV stand, just a turntable to watch.". - Too Much Joy's song "Sort of Haunted House", from "Mutiny", is inspired by DeLillo. - Milo (musician)'s song "The Gus Haynes Cribbage League" mentions him with the line: "I got hair like a pad of Brillo, and date girls whose dad could be Don DeLillo."</s><s>References in popular culture.:In publications. - Paul Auster dedicated his books "In the Country of Last Things" and "Leviathan" to his friend Don DeLillo. - Ryan Boudinot and Neal Pollack contributed humor pieces to the journal "McSweeney's" satirizing DeLillo. - A fictionalized DeLillo blogs for "The Onion". - A fictionalized version of DeLillo makes a few appearances as a minor character

Don DeLillo

in A.M. Homes' 2012 novel "May We Be Forgiven". - A fictionalized version of a younger, pre-fame DeLillo during his career as an advertising copywriter in New York, appears briefly as a minor character in David Bowman's posthumous third novel "Big Bang" (2019) - Emma Cline's short story "White Noise", published June 1, 2020, by "The New Yorker", features a fictionalized version of DeLillo. Harvey, the central character of the story and a fictionalized version of Harvey Weinstein, mistakes his neighbor for DeLillo and fantasizes about the two of them collaborating on a film version of "White Noise".</s><s>References in popular culture.:In reviews. - David Foster Wallace saluted DeLillo, Cynthia Ozick, and Cormac McCarthy as three of the greatest living fiction authors in the United States.</s><s>Bibliography.</s><s>Bibliography.:Novels. - - "End Zone" (1972) - "Great Jones Street" (1973) - "Ratner's Star" (1976) - "Players" (1977) - "Running Dog" (1978) - "Amazons" (1980) (under pseudonym "Cleo Birdwell") - "The

Don DeLillo

Names" (1982) - "White Noise" (1985) - "Libra" (1988) - "Mao II" (1991) - "Underworld" (1997) - "The Body Artist" (2001) - "Cosmopolis" (2003) - "Falling Man" (2007) - "Point Omega" (2010) - "Zero K" (2016) - "The Silence" (2020)</s><s>Bibliography.:Short fiction. - Collections - "The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories" (2011) - Short stories - "The River Jordan" (1960) (First published in "Epoch" 10, No. 2 (Winter 1960), pp. 105–120) - "Take the "A" Train" (1962) (First published in "Epoch" 12, No. 1 (Spring 1962) pp. 9–25.) - "Spaghetti and Meatballs" (1965) (First published in "Epoch" 14, No. 3 (Spring 1965) pp. 244–250) - "Coming Sun.Mon.Tues." (1966) (First published in "Kenyon Review" 28, No. 3 (June 1966), pp.

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391–394.) - "Baghdad Towers West" (1967) (First published in "Epoch" 17, No. 3 (Spring 1968), pp. 195–217.) - "The Uniforms" (1970) (First published in "Carolina Quarterly" 22, 1970, pp. 4–11.) - "In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century" (1971) (First published in "Esquire", Dec. 1971, pp. 174–177, 243, 246.) - "Total Loss Weekend" (1972) (First published in "Sports Illustrated", November 27, 1972, pp. 98–101+) - "Creation" (1979) (First published in "Antaeus" No. 33, Spring 1979, pp. 32–46.) - "The Sightings" (1979) (First published in "Weekend Magazine" (Summer Fiction Issue, out of Toronto), August 4, 1979, pp. 26–30.) - "Human Moments in World War III" (1983) (First published in "Esquire", July 1983, pp. 118–126.) - "The Ivory Acrobat" (1988) (First published in "Granta" 25

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, Autumn 1988, pp. 199–212.) - "The Runner" (1988) (First published in "Harper's", Sept. 1988, pp. 61–63.) - "Pafko at the Wall" (1992) (First published in "Harper's", Oct. 1992, pp. 35–70.) - "The Angel Esmeralda" (1995) (First published in "Esquire", May 1994, pp. 100–109.) - "Baader-Meinhof" (2002) (First published in "The New Yorker", April 1, 2002, pp. 78–82.) - "The Border of Fallen Bodies" (2003) (First Published in "Esquire", April 1, 2003) - "Still Life" (2007) (First published in "The New Yorker", April 9, 2007) - "Midnight in Dostoevsky" (2009) (First Published in "The New Yorker", November 30, 2009) - "Hammer and Sickle" (2010) (First published in "Harper's", Dec. 2010, pp. 63–74) - "The Starveling" (2011) (First published in

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"Granta" 117, Autumn 2011) - - "The Itch" (2017) (First published in "The New Yorker", July 31, 2017)</s><s>Bibliography.:Plays. - "Mother" (1966) - "The Engineer of Moonlight" (1979) - "The Day Room" (first production 1986) - "The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven" (1990) - "Game 6" (1991) - "Libra" (1994) - "Valparaiso" (first production 1999) - "The Mystery at the Middle of Ordinary Life" (2000) - "Love-Lies-Bleeding" (first production 2005) - "The Word for Snow" (first production in 2007)</s><s>Bibliography.:Screenplays. - "Game 6" (2005), the story of a playwright (played by Michael Keaton) and his obsession with the Boston Red Sox and the 1986 World Series, was written in the early 1990s, but wasn't produced until 2005, ironically one year after the Red Sox won their first World Series title in 86 years. To date, it is DeLillo's only work for film.</s><s>Bibliography.:Essays and reporting. -

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"American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK" (1983) (Published in "Rolling Stone", December 8, 1983. DeLillo's first major published essay. Seen as signposting his interest in the JFK assassination that would ultimately lead to "Libra") - "Salman Rushdie Defense" (1994) (Co-written with Paul Auster in defense of Salman Rushdie, following the announcement of a fatwa upon Rushdie after the publication of "The Satanic Verses") - "The Artist Naked in a Cage" (1997) (A short piece ran in "The New Yorker" on May 26, 1997, pages 6–7. An address delivered on May 13, 1997, at the New York Public Library's event "Stand In for Wei Jingsheng.") - "The Power of History" (1997) (Published in the September 7, 1997, issue of the "New York Times Magazine". Preceded the publication of "Underworld" and was viewed by many as a rationale for the novel) - "A History of the Writer Alone in a Room" (1999) (This piece is the acceptance address given by DeLillo on the occasion of being awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1999. A small pamphlet was

Don DeLillo

printed with this address, an address by Scribner editor-in-chief Nan Graham, the Jury's Citation, and an address by Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert. It was reprinted in a German translation in "Die Zeit" in 2001. The piece is in five numbered sections, and is about five pages long.) - "In the Ruins of the Future" (Dec 2001) (This short essay appeared in "Harper's Magazine". It concerns the September 11 incidents, terrorism, and America and comprises eight numbered sections.) - - Notes</s><s>Awards and award nominations. - 1979 – Guggenheim Fellowship - 1984 – Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters - 1985 – National Book Award (Fiction) for "White Noise" "National Book Awards – 1985". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-28. (With essays by Courtney Eldridge, Matthew Pitt, and Jess Walter from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - 1985 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1985) for "White Noise" - 1988 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1988) for "Libra" - 1988 – "The New York Times" Best Books of the Year (1988

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) for "Libra" - 1988 – National Book Award finalist (Fiction) for "Libra" "National Book Awards – 1988". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 28, 2012. - 1989 – Election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. - 1989 – "Irish Times", Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize for "Libra" - 1992 – PEN/Faulkner Award for "Mao II" - 1992 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination for "Mao II" - 1995 – Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award - 1997 – National Book Award finalist (Fiction) for "Underworld" "National Book Awards – 1997". National Book Foundation. Retrieved March 28, 2012. - 1997 – National Book Critics Circle Award finalist (Fiction, 1997) for "Underworld" - 1997 – New York Times Best Books of the Year nominee for "Underworld" - 1998 – Pulitzer Prize for Fiction nomination for "Underworld" - 1998 – American Book Award for "Underworld" - 1999 – Jerusalem Prize - 1999 – International Dublin Literary Award shortlist for "Underworld" - 2000 – William Dean Howells Medal awarded for "Underworld" - 2000 – "Riccardo Bacchelli" International Award

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for "Underworld" - 2001 – James Tait Black Memorial Prize shortlist (Fiction, 2001) for "The Body Artist" - 2003 – International Dublin Literary Award longlist for "The Body Artist" - 2006 – New York Times: Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years (runner-up) for "Underworld" - 2007 – "The New York Times" Notable Book of the Year (Fiction and Poetry) for "Falling Man" - 2007 – Booklist Top of the List: A Best of Editors Choice for "Falling Man" - 2007 – Nominee for Man Booker International Prize - 2009 – Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service for achievements in literature - 2009 – International Dublin Literary Award longlist for "Falling Man" - 2010 – St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates - 2010 – PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction - 2011 – "The New York Times" 100 Notable Books of 2011 list for "The Angel Esmeralda" - 2012 – The Story Prize finalist for "The Angel Esmeralda" - 2012 – PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction finalist for "The Angel Esmeralda"

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- 2012 – Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award longlist for "The Angel Esmeralda" - 2012 – Carl Sandburg Literary Award - 2012 – International Dublin Literary Award longlist for "Point Omega" - 2013 – Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction - 2014 – Norman Mailer Prize for Lifetime Achievement - 2015 – National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters</s><s>Further reading. - Adelman, Gary, "Sorrow's Rigging: The Novels of Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, and Robert Stone", McGill-Queen's University Press, 2012. - Bloom, Harold (ed.), "Don DeLillo (Bloom's Major Novelists)", Chelsea House, 2003. - Boxall, Peter, "Don DeLillo: The Possibility of Fiction", Routledge, 2006. - Civello, Paul, "American Literary Naturalism and its Twentieth-century Transformations: Frank Norris, Ernest Hemingway, Don DeLillo", University of Georgia Press, 1994. - Cowart, David, "Don DeLillo – The Physics of Language", University of Georgia Press, 2002. - Da Cunha Lewin, Katherine (ed.), Ward, Kiron (ed.), "Don DeLillo: Contemporary

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Critical Perspectives", Bloomsbury Press, 2018. - Dewey, Joseph, "Beyond Grief and Nothing: A Reading of Don DeLillo", University of South Carolina Press, 2006. - Dewey, Joseph (ed.), Kellman, Steven G. (ed.), Malin, Irving (ed.), "Underwords: Perspectives on Don DeLillo's Underworld", University of Delaware Press, 2002. - Duvall, John, "Don DeLillo's Underworld: A Reader's Guide", Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002. - Duvall, John (ed.), "The Cambridge Companion to Don DeLillo", Cambridge UP, 2008. - Ebbeson, Jeffrey, "Postmodernism and its Others: The Fiction of Ishmael Reed, Kathy Acker, and Don DeLillo (Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory)", Routledge, 2010. - Engles, Tim (ed.), Duvall, John (ed.), "Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise", Modern Language Association Press, 2006. - Giaimo, Paul, "Appreciating Don DeLillo: The Moral Force of A Writer's Work", Praeger Publishers Inc, 2011. - Herren, Graley. "The Self-

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Reflexive Art of Don DeLillo." Bloomsbury Press, 2020. - Halldorson, Stephanie, "The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo", 2007. - Hantke, Steffen, "Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction: The works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy", Peter Lang Publishing, 1994. - Hugonnier, Francois, "Archiving the Excesses of the Real: Don DeLillo's Falling Man", Presses Universitaires de Paris Ouest, 2016. - Kavadlo, Jesse, "Don DeLillo: Balance at the Edge of Belief", Peter Lang Publishing, 2004. - Keesey, Douglas, "Don DeLillo", Macmillan, 1993. - Laist, Randy, "Technology and Postmodern Subjectivity in Don DeLillo's Novels", Peter Lang Publishing, 2010. - LeClair, Tom "In the Loop – Don DeLillo and the Systems Novel", University of Illinois Press, 1987. - Lentricchia, Frank (ed.), "Introducing Don DeLillo", Duke University Press, 1991. - Lentricchia, Frank (ed.), "New Essays on

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White Noise", Cambridge University Press, 1991. - Martucci, Elise, "The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo", Routledge, 2007. - Morley, Catherine, "The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Literature", Routledge, 2008. - Naas, Michael. "Don DeLillo, American Original: Drugs, Weapons, Erotica, and Other Literary Contraband", Bloomsbury, 2020. - Olster, Stacy (ed.), "Don DeLillo: Mao II, Underworld, Falling Man (Continuum Studies in Contemporary North America Fiction)", Continuum, 2011. - Orr, Leonard, "White Noise: A Reader's Guide" Continuum International Publishing Group, 2003. - Osteen, Mark "American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture", University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. - Rey, Rebecca, "Staging Don DeLillo", Routledge, 2016. - Ruppersburg, Hugh (ed.), Engles, Tim (ed.), "Critical Essays on Don DeLillo", G.K. Hall, 2000. - Schneck, Peter & Schweighauser, Philipp (eds.),"Terrorism, Media, and the Ethics of Fiction: Transatlantic Perspectives

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on Don Delillo", Continuum, 2010. - Schuster, Marc, "Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum", Cambria Press, 2008. - Shapiro, Michael J. "The politics of fear: DeLillo's postmodern burrow". In: Shapiro, Michael J. Reading the postmodern polity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 122–139, 1992. - Sozalan, Azden, "The American Nightmare: Don DeLillo's Falling Man and Cormac McCarthy's The Road", Authorhouse Publishing, 2011. - Taylor, Mark C, "Rewiring the Real: In Conversation with William Gaddis, Richard Powers, Mark Danielewski, and Don DeLillo (Religion, Culture and Public Life)", Columbia University Press, 2013. - Trainini, Marco, "Don DeLillo", prefazione di Fabio Vittorini, Castelvecchi, Roma, 2016. - Veggian, Henry, "Understanding Don DeLillo", University of South Carolina Press, 2014. - Weinstein, Arnold, "Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction From Hawthorne to DeLillo", Oxford University Press, 1993.</s>


Prompt: Question: Tell me a bio of Charles B. McVay III.

Charles B. McVay III

<s>Charles B. McVay III Charles Butler McVay III (August 31, 1898 – November 6, 1968) was an American naval officer and the commanding officer of the cruiser which was lost in action in 1945, resulting in a significant loss of life. Of all captains in the history of the United States Navy, he is the only one to have been subjected to court-martial for losing a ship sunk by an act of war, despite the fact that he was on a top secret mission maintaining radio silence (the testimony of the Japanese commander who sank his ship also seemed to exonerate McVay). After years of mental health problems, he killed himself aged 70 years. Following years of efforts by some survivors and others to clear his name, McVay was posthumously exonerated by the 106th United States Congress and President Bill Clinton on October 30, 2000.</s><s>Education and career. Charles Butler McVay III was born in Ephrata, Pennsylvania, on August 31, 1898, to a Navy family. His father, Charles Butler McVay Jr. (1868–1949), commanded the tender during the cruise of the Great White Fleet (1907–1909), was an admiral in the United States Navy during

Charles B. McVay III

World War I, and served as Commander-in-Chief of the Asiatic Fleet in the early 1930s. Charles III was a 1920 graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland. Before taking command of "Indianapolis" in November 1944, McVay was chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Combined Chiefs of Staff in Washington, D.C., the Allies' highest intelligence unit. Earlier in World War II, he was awarded the Silver Star for displaying courage under fire. McVay led the ship through the invasion of Iwo Jima, then the bombardment of Okinawa in the spring of 1945, during which "Indianapolis" anti-aircraft guns shot down seven enemy planes before the ship was struck by a kamikaze on March 31, inflicting heavy casualties, including eight dead, and penetrating the ship's hull. McVay returned the ship safely to Mare Island in California for repairs.</s><s>Sinking of "Indianapolis". Later that year, "Indianapolis" received orders to carry parts and nuclear material to Tinian to be used in the atomic bombs which were soon to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After delivering her top secret cargo, the ship was en route to report for further duty off Okinawa.

Charles B. McVay III

Early in the morning of July 30, 1945, it was attacked by the under Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. Hashimoto launched six torpedoes and hit "Indianapolis" twice, the first removing over forty feet of her bow, the second hitting the starboard side at frame forty (below the bridge). "Indianapolis" immediately took a fifteen degree list, capsized and sank within 12 minutes. Of the crew of 1,195 men, 879 men died.</s><s>Delayed rescue. About 300 of the 1,196 men on board either died in the initial attack or were trapped belowdecks and drowned when compartments were sealed in an effort to prevent sinking. The remainder of the crew, about 900 men, were able to abandon ship. Some were left floating in the water, many without lifeboats, until the rescue of 316 survivors was completed four days (100 hours) later. Because of Navy protocol regarding secret missions, the ship was not reported "overdue" and the rescue came only after survivors were spotted by pilot Lieutenant Wilber (Chuck) Gwinn and co-pilot Lieutenant Warren Colwell on a routine patrol flight. Of those who did abandon ship, most casualties were due to injuries sustained aboard the ship, dehydration, exhaustion,

Charles B. McVay III

drinking salt water and shark attacks. The seas had been moderate, but visibility was not good. "Indianapolis" had been steaming at. When the ship did not reach Leyte on the 31st, as scheduled, no report was made that she was overdue. This omission was officially recorded later as "due to a misunderstanding of the Movement Report System".</s><s>Controversy. McVay was wounded but survived, and was among those rescued. He repeatedly asked the Navy why it took four days to rescue his men but never received an answer. The Navy long claimed that SOS messages were never received because the ship was operating under a policy of radio silence; declassified records show that three SOS messages were received separately, but none were acted upon because one commander was drunk, another thought it was a Japanese ruse, and the third had given orders not to be disturbed. After a Navy Court of Inquiry recommended that McVay be court-martialed for the loss of "Indianapolis", Admiral Chester Nimitz disagreed and instead issued the captain a letter of reprimand. Admiral Ernest King overturned Nimitz's decision and recommended a court-martial, which Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal later convened. McVay was charged with failing to zigzag

Charles B. McVay III

and failure to order abandon ship in a timely manner. He was convicted on the former. Prior knowledge of Japanese submarines being identified in the area was withheld from the court and from McVay, prior to sailing, as well. Following McVay's conviction for hazarding "Indianapolis" by failing to zigzag, Admiral King recommended setting aside the punishment. Hashimoto, the Japanese submarine commander who had sunk "Indianapolis", was on record as describing visibility at the time as fair, which is corroborated by the fact that he was able to target and sink "Indianapolis" in the first place. He also testified that zigzagging wouldn't have made a difference, as he would have still sunk the Indianapolis, due to being in such a good position to do so. American submarine experts testified that "zigzagging" was a technique of negligible value in eluding enemy submarines. Hashimoto also testified to this effect. Despite that testimony, the official ruling was that visibility was good, and the court held McVay responsible for failing to zigzag. An additional point of controversy is evidence that the admirals in the United States Navy were primarily responsible for placing the ship in harm's way. For instance, McVay requested a destroyer

Charles B. McVay III

escort for "Indianapolis", but his request was denied because the priority for destroyers at the time was escorting transports to Okinawa and picking up downed aircrew in B-29 raids on Japan. Also, naval command assumed McVay's route would be safe at that point in the war. Many ships, including most destroyers, were equipped with submarine detection equipment, but the "Indianapolis" was not so equipped, which casts the decision to deny McVay's request for an escort as military incompetence. On July 24, 1945, just six days prior to the sinking of "Indianapolis", the destroyer had been attacked and sunk in the area by Japanese submarines. Yet McVay was never informed of this event, and several others, in part due to issues of classified intelligence. McVay was warned of the potential presence of Japanese subs, but not of the actual confirmed activity. Although about 380 ships of the U.S. Navy were lost in combat in World War II, McVay was the only captain to be court-martialed for the loss of his ship. It was widely felt that he had been a fall guy for the Navy. The conviction effectively ended McVay's career as he lost seniority, although the sentence was

Charles B. McVay III

overturned by Secretary James Forrestal owing to McVay's bravery prior to the sinking, and McVay was finally promoted to rear admiral when he retired from the navy in 1949, although he apparently never got over his treatment. In his book "Abandon Ship", author Richard F. Newcomb posits a motive for Admiral King's ordering McVay's court-martial. According to Captain McVay III's father, Admiral Charles B. McVay Jr., "'King never forgot a grudge". King had been a junior officer under the command of McVay's father when King and other officers snuck some women aboard a ship. Admiral McVay had a letter of reprimand placed in King's record for that. "Now," he raged, "King's used [my son] to get back at me."</s><s>Suicide. On November 6, 1968, McVay took his own life by shooting himself at his home in Litchfield, Connecticut. Contrary to what many may believe, McVay used a Colt pistol, an Officer's Model Target 38 Special. It was manufactured in 1906 and was not issued to the US Navy despite what the name could lead some to believe, according to the USS Indianapolis Legacy

Charles B. McVay III

Organization. Commonly this pistol has been referred to as McVay's service pistol, which it was not. There is another myth, that he was holding in his hand a toy sailor he had received as a boy for a good luck charm. This is also untrue, as police reports obtained by the Legacy Organization do not mention this nor show any other objects in the pictures aside from his pistol. He was found in his back porch by his gardener. Though a note was not left, McVay was known by those close to him to have suffered from loneliness, particularly after losing his wife to cancer in 1961. McVay also struggled throughout his life from the impact of vitriolic letters and phone calls he periodically received from grief-stricken relatives of dead crewmen who served aboard the "Indianapolis".</s><s>Exoneration. survivors organized, and many spent years attempting to clear their skipper's name. Many people, from McVay's son Charles McVay IV (1925–2012) to author Dan Kurzman, who chronicled the "Indianapolis" incident in "Fatal Voyage", to members of Congress, long believed McVay was unfairly convicted. Paul Murphy, president of the USS "Indianapolis" Survivors Organization,

Charles B. McVay III

said: "Captain McVay's court-martial was simply to divert attention from the terrible loss of life caused by procedural mistakes which never alerted anyone that we were missing." Over fifty years after the incident, a 12-year-old student in Pensacola, Florida, Hunter Scott, was instrumental in raising awareness of the miscarriage of justice carried out at the captain's court-martial. As part of a school project for the National History Day program, the young man interviewed nearly 150 survivors of the "Indianapolis" sinking and reviewed 800 documents. His testimony before the U.S. Congress brought national attention to the situation. In October 2000, the United States Congress passed a Sense of Congress resolution that McVay's record should reflect that "he is exonerated for the loss of the USS "Indianapolis"." President Clinton also signed the resolution. Commander Hashimoto died five days before the exoneration (on 25 October). In May 2001, Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England ordered Captain William Toti, former commanding officer of, to enter the Sense of Congress resolution into McVay's official Navy personnel record.</s><s>In popular culture. McVay's ship, but not McVay himself, is mentioned in the 1975 blockbuster movie

Charles B. McVay III

"Jaws", in which the character of Quint is portrayed as a survivor of the incident. In 1978, the events surrounding McVay's court-martial were dramatized in "The Failure to ZigZag" by playwright John B. Ferzacca. The 1991 made-for-television movie "" depicts the ordeal of the men of the "Indianapolis" during her last voyage (with McVay portrayed by Stacy Keach), as does the 2016 film "" (with McVay portrayed by Nicolas Cage). Also in 2016, "USS Indianapolis: The Legacy" was released. It is an in-depth film where the survivors tell the story of what happened and they speak about the aftermath of the tragic event. In 2019, PBS released a 90-minute documentary titled "".</s><s>See also. - W. Graham Claytor Jr. - List of U.S. Navy losses in World War II - United States military veteran suicide</s>