Editing Don DeLillo (section)

===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). Influenced by the events surrounding the [[Satanic Verses controversy|fatwa]] placed on [[Salman Rushdie]] and the intrusion of the press into the life of [[J. D. Salinger]], ''Mao II'' earned DeLillo significant critical praise from, among others, [[John Banville]] and [[Thomas Pynchon]].<ref name="nytimes.com" /> It won the [[PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction|PEN/Faulkner Award]]  in 1992.

Following ''Mao II'', DeLillo went underground and spent several years writing and researching his 11th novel. In 1992, he published the folio short story "[[Pafko at the Wall]]" in ''[[Harper's Magazine]]''. The piece recounts [[Bobby Thomson]]'s [[Shot Heard 'Round the World (baseball)|Shot Heard 'Round the World]] from the perspective of various witnesses, real and fictional. He told ''[[The Paris Review]]'', "Sometime in late 1991, I started writing something new and didn't know what it would be – 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."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Begley |first=Adam |title=The Art of Fiction No. 135 |work=[[The Paris Review]] |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1887/the-art-of-fiction-no-135-don-delillo}}</ref>

This would become the prologue of his epic Cold War history ''[[Underworld (DeLillo novel)|Underworld]]''. DeLillo took inspiration from the October 4, 1951, front page of ''[[The New York Times]]'', which juxtaposed Thomson's home-run alongside the news that the [[Soviet Union]] had tested a [[hydrogen bomb]].<ref>{{Cite news |date=October 4, 1951 |title=Giants Capture Pennant, Beating Dodgers 5-4 in 9th on Thomson's 3-Run Homer |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/05/home/frontpage.html}}</ref> The book was widely heralded as a masterpiece, with novelist and critic [[Martin Amis]] saying it marked "the ascension of a great writer."<ref>{{cite news |author = Amis, Martin |title = Survivors of the Cold War |url = https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/10/05/reviews/971005.05amisdt.html |work = The New York Times |date = October 5, 1997}}</ref> [[Harold Bloom]] called it "the culmination of what Don can do."<ref>{{Cite news |last=Price |first=Leonard |date=June 15, 2009 |title=Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian |work=[[The A.V. Club]] |url=https://www.avclub.com/harold-bloom-on-blood-meridian-1798216782}}</ref>

''Underworld'' went on to become one of DeLillo's most acclaimed novels 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.<ref name="nba1997" /> The novel won the 1998 [[American Book Awards|American Book Award]] and the [[William Dean Howells Medal]] in 2000.<ref name="Scott">{{Cite news |last=Scott |first=A. O. |date=May 21, 2006 |title=In Search of the Best |work=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/review/scott-essay.html}}</ref>

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?"<ref name="dumpendebat.net"/> After rereading it in 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."<ref name="entertainment.timesonline.co.uk"/>