Editing Don DeLillo (section)

==Early life and influences==
DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936, in New York City and grew up in a Catholic family, with ties to [[Molise]], Italy, in an Italian-American neighborhood of [[the Bronx]] not far from [[Arthur Avenue, Bronx|Arthur Avenue]].<ref name="nytimes.com">{{Cite news
|first=Vince
|last=Passaro
|title=Dangerous Don DeLillo
|url=https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-v-dangerous.html
|work=The New York Times
|date =May 19, 1991
}}</ref> 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."<ref name="dumpendebat.net">{{cite news |last1=Amend |first1=Christoph |last2=Diez |first2=Georg |url=http://dumpendebat.net/static-content/delillo-diezeit-Oct2007.html |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080115100418/http://dumpendebat.net/static-content/delillo-diezeit-Oct2007.html |url-status=dead |archive-date=January 15, 2008 |title=Dum Pendebat Filius: Translation of "Ich kenne Amerika nicht mehr" ("I don't know America anymore") |newspaper=Die Zeit |date=October 11, 2007 |access-date=December 30, 2011 }}</ref>

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 personal golden age of reading in my 20s and my early 30s, and then my writing began to take up so much time".<ref name="theaustralian1">{{cite news|url=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/dancing-to-the-music-of-time/story-e6frg8nf-1225836068982 |title=Dancing to the music of time |newspaper=The Australian |date=March 6, 2010 |access-date=March 16, 2010}}</ref> 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.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.perival.com/delillo/ddinterview_henning.html |title=DeLillo Interview by Peter Henning, 2003 |publisher=Perival.com |access-date=December 30, 2011 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111123024148/http://www.perival.com/delillo/ddinterview_henning.html |archive-date=November 23, 2011}}</ref>

As well as the influence of [[Modernist literature|modernist]] fiction, DeLillo has also cited the influence of jazz music—"guys like [[Ornette Coleman]] and [[Charles Mingus|Mingus]] and [[John Coltrane|Coltrane]] and [[Miles Davis]]"—and postwar cinema: "[[Michelangelo Antonioni|Antonioni]] and [[Jean-Luc Godard|Godard]] and [[François Truffaut|Truffaut]], and then in the '70s came the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: [[Stanley Kubrick|Kubrick]], [[Robert Altman|Altman]], [[Francis Ford Coppola|Coppola]], [[Martin Scorsese|Scorsese]] and so on. I don't know how they may have affected the way I write, but I do have a visual sense."<ref>{{cite news|first=Kevin|last=Nance |url=http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-12/features/ct-prj-1014-don-delillo-20121012_1_mao-ii-angel-esmeralda-printers-row/2 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121014041201/http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-12/features/ct-prj-1014-don-delillo-20121012_1_mao-ii-angel-esmeralda-printers-row/2 |url-status=dead |archive-date=October 14, 2012 |title=Don DeLillo talks about writing – Page 2 |newspaper=Chicago Tribune |date=October 12, 2012 |access-date=November 23, 2013}}</ref> 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 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."<ref name="perival_b">http://www.perival.com/delillo/delillo_panic_interview_2005.html {{dead link|date=November 2013}}</ref> 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."<ref name="washingtonpost.com">{{cite news|first=Ron|last=Charles |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/don-delillo-is-first-recipient-of-library-of-congress-prize-for-american-fiction/2013/04/24/ae1ff5f8-acd5-11e2-b6fd-ba6f5f26d70e_story.html |title=Don DeLillo is first recipient of Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction |newspaper=The Washington Post |date= April 25, 2013|access-date=November 23, 2013}}</ref>

After graduating from [[Cardinal Hayes High School]] in the Bronx in 1954 and from [[Fordham University]] 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]],<ref name="entertainment.timesonline.co.uk"/> 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 I left, in 1964."<ref name="guernicamag.com">{{cite web |url=http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/373/intensity_of_a_plot/ |title=Intensity of a Plot: Mark Binelli interviews Don DeLillo |publisher=Guernica |date=July 2007 |access-date=December 30, 2011 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120214222458/http://www.guernicamag.com/interviews/373/intensity_of_a_plot/ |archive-date=February 14, 2012}}</ref>

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."<ref>{{cite news
| author = Passaro, Vince
| title = Dangerous Don DeLillo
| url = https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-v-dangerous.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=login
| work=The New York Times
| date = May 19, 1991
}}</ref>
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."<ref name="theparisreview.org">{{cite magazine|author=Interviewed by Adam Begley |url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo |title=Don DeLillo, The Art of Fiction No. 135: Interviewed by Adam Begley |magazine=The Paris Review |date=Fall 1993 |access-date=December 30, 2011}}</ref> He cites [[William Gaddis]]'s ''[[The Recognitions]]'' as a formative influence: "It was a revelation, a piece of writing with the beauty and texture of a Shakespearean monologue-or, maybe more apt, a work of Renaissance art impossibly transformed from image into words. And they were the words of a contemporary American. This, to me, was the wonder of it."<ref>{{Cite web |last=Biblioklept |date=September 14, 2014 |title=Don DeLillo on William Gaddis |url=https://biblioklept.org/2014/09/14/don-delillo-on-william-gaddis/ |access-date=April 10, 2023 |website=Biblioklept |language=en}}</ref>