DeLillo, Don

Donald Richard "Don" DeLillo is an American author born in New York City. He grew up in a Catholic working-class family in Fordham, the Bronx. His Italian parents owned a bakery; his father later worked in insurance. DeLillo spent much of his youth in the streets, playing sports, cards and pool. He listened a lot to the radio and he loved jazz, but he did not read books until he started working as a parking attendant in his late teens and discovered Faulkner, Hemingway and Joyce. DeLillo has said that European film and abstract expressionism in art have been more important to his work than literature.