His works have covered subjects as diverse as consumerism, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, television, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.

DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet.

"[7] 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.

"[16] 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.

"[12] 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"[20]—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.

[16] 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.

[citation needed] While DeLillo was living in Greece,[25] he took three years[22] to write The Names (1982), a complex thriller about "a risk analyst who crosses paths with a cult of assassins in the Middle East".

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.

Influenced by the events surrounding the 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.

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.

"[13] 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.

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.

DeLillo ended the decade by making an unexpected appearance at a PEN event on the steps of the New York 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.

[49] 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.

"[55] 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.

[58] The advanced blurb for the novel is as follows: Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a George Soros-like billionaire now in his sixties, with a younger wife, Artis, whose health is failing.

"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."

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 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 volume also features two nonfiction essays by DeLillo: "American Blood", about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Jack Ruby, and "Silhouette City", about neo-Nazis in contemporary America.

"[71] Many of DeLillo's books (notably White Noise) satirize academia and explore postmodern themes of rampant consumerism, novelty intellectualism, underground conspiracies, the disintegration and re-integration of the family, and the promise of rebirth through violence.

"[72] 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 recurring 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).

Is it the writer who traditionally thought he could influence the imagination of his contemporaries or is it the totalitarian leader, the military man, the terrorist, those who are twisted by power and who seem capable of imposing their vision on the world, reducing the earth to a place of danger and anger.

[76] Robert McCrum included Underworld on his list of the 100 greatest English-language novels, calling it "the work of a writer wired into contemporary America from the ground up, spookily attuned to the weird vibrations of popular culture and the buzz of everyday, ordinary conversations on bus and subway.

Underworld was the runner-up, behind Toni Morrison's Beloved and ahead of McCarthy's Blood Meridian, John Updike's collected Rabbit Angstrom and Roth's American Pastoral.

In the accompanying essay, A. O. Scott compared DeLillo's style to those of Updike and Roth: "Like American Pastoral, Underworld is a chronologically fractured story drawn by a powerful nostalgic undertow back to the redolent streets of a postwar Eastern city...but whereas Updike and Roth work to establish connection and coherence in the face of time's chaos, DeLillo is an artist of diffusion and dispersal, of implication and missing information.

But more than his other books, Underworld is concerned with roots, in particular with ethnicity...and the characteristic rhythms of DeLillo's prose – the curious noun-verb inversions, the quick switches from abstraction to earthiness, from the decorous to the profane, are shown to arise, as surely as Roth's do, from the polyglot idiom of the old neighborhood.

"[32][79] 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 are banal ideas badly written.

Most critics, however, regard DeLillo as a gifted stylist; reviewing Mao II, Michiko Kakutani said that "The writing is dazzling; the images, so radioactive they glow afterward in our minds.