Editing Don DeLillo (section)

===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.<ref name="theaustralian1"/>

DeLillo resigned from the advertising industry in 1964, moved into a modest apartment near the [[Queens–Midtown Tunnel]] ("It wasn't Paris in the 1920s, but I was happy"), and began work on his first novel.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=36810 |title=mean streak – artforum.com / scene & herd |publisher=Artforum.com |access-date=November 23, 2013 |archive-date=November 11, 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131111020258/http://www.artforum.com/diary/id=36810 |url-status=dead }}</ref> 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."<ref name="guernicamag.com"/> His first novel, ''[[Americana (novel)|Americana]]'', was written over four years<ref name="nytimes.com"/> and finally published in 1971, to modest critical praise. It concerned "a television network programmer who hits the road in search of the big picture".<ref name="nytimes.com"/>

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."<ref name="online.wsj.com">{{cite news|last=Alter |first=Alexandra |url=https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703906204575027094208914032 |title=Don DeLillo Deconstructed|work=The Wall Street Journal|date=January 29, 2010 |access-date=March 16, 2010}}</ref> Later still, DeLillo continued to feel a degree of surprise that ''Americana'' was published: "I was working on my first novel, ''Americana'', 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."<ref name="washingtonpost.com"/>

''Americana'' was followed in rapid succession by the American college football/nuclear war black comedy ''[[End Zone (novel)|End Zone]]'' (1972)—written under the working titles "The Self-Erasing Word" and "Modes of Disaster Technology"<ref name="newyorker.com">{{cite magazine|author=D. T. Max |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/06/11/final-destination |title=Letter from Austin: Final Destination |magazine=[[The New Yorker]] |access-date=November 23, 2013}}</ref>—and the rock and roll satire ''[[Great Jones Street (novel)|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."<ref name="guernicamag.com"/> 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's Adventures in Wonderland|Alice in Wonderland]]'' and ''[[Through the Looking-Glass|Alice Through the Looking Glass]]''<ref name="ReferenceC"/>—took two years to write and drew numerous favorable comparisons to the works of [[Thomas Pynchon]].<ref name="theparisreview.org" /> 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."<ref>{{cite web|author=Published |url=https://nymag.com/arts/books/features/31522/ |title=Our Guide to the Don DeLillo Oeuvre – New York Magazine |publisher=Nymag.com |date=May 7, 2007 |access-date=March 16, 2010}}</ref> DeLillo has said it was both one of the most difficult books for him to write and his personal favorite.<ref name="nytimes">{{cite news |last=Harris |first=Robert R. |date=October 10, 1982 |title=A Talk with Don DeLillo |newspaper=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/16/lifetimes/del-v-talk1982.html}}</ref>

Following this early attempt at a major long novel, DeLillo ended the decade with two shorter works. ''[[Players (DeLillo novel)|Players]]'' (1977), originally conceived as "based on what could be called the intimacy of language—what people who live together really sound like",<ref name="perival">{{cite web|url=http://perival.com/delillo/players.html |title=Players – Don DeLillo – 1977 |publisher=Perival.com |date=December 18, 2012 |access-date=November 23, 2013}}</ref> concerned the lives of a young yuppie couple as the husband gets involved with a cell of domestic terrorists.<ref name="perival" /> Its 1978 successor, ''[[Running Dog (novel)|Running Dog]]'' (1978), written in four months,<ref name="guernicamag.com"/> 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 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."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://perival.com/delillo/runningdog.html |title=Running Dog – Don DeLillo – 1978 |publisher=Perival.com |date=January 30, 2010 |access-date=November 23, 2013}}</ref>

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 (novel)|Amazons]]'' and ''[[The Names (novel)|The Names]]''.<ref name="theaustralian1"/>

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 1980s and '90s."<ref name="theaustralian1"/> 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."<ref name="guernicamag.com"/>