Don DeLillo was born in New York City in 1936 and grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx, near Arthur Avenue. He went to Cardinal Hayes High School and then to Fordham University, where he studied communication arts, and after he graduated in 1958 he went to work writing advertising copy. He wrote short stories on the side, and in the mid-1960s he quit the agency to write full time.

His first novel, Americana, came out in 1971, and a string of strange, sharp, funny novels followed, about football, rock stars, mathematics and terrorism. They were admired by other writers long before many readers found them. That changed in 1985 with White Noise, a comic novel about a professor of Hitler Studies, his family, their supermarket, their television, and an “airborne toxic event” that drifts over their town. It won the National Book Award and has been read in college classrooms ever since.

DeLillo became the great novelist of the way Americans live among signals: news, ads, crowds, rumors and screens. Libra (1988) imagined the life of Lee Harvey Oswald and the plotting around him. Mao II (1991), about a reclusive novelist, a photographer and a crowd, won the PEN/Faulkner Award. And Underworld (1997), his longest book, follows a single home-run baseball, hit in the famous 1951 playoff game between the Giants and the Dodgers, through half a century of American life.

His sentences are cool, precise and often very funny, and they have a way of noticing what everyone sees but nobody says. He seldom gives interviews and has never cared much for fame, which only makes his readers more devoted.

He has kept writing into his eighties, in shorter, stranger novels. If you start with one, start with White Noise. If you start a second, make it Underworld, and give yourself a long winter for it.