“How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.”

American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist

Donald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. He is known for fiction that takes on modern life and its pressures, from consumer culture and television to politics, economics, sport, and the digital age. Across novels, stories, plays, scripts, and essays, DeLillo returns to the systems and language that shape public and private life. His work also engages with nuclear war, art, and mathematics, often tracing how ideas, media, and technology affect the way people think and speak.