Don DeLillo Novels Reading Order

Don DeLillo's Underworld (1997) is one of the great American novels of the twentieth century's second half — a vast, formally ambitious work that takes the Cold War as its organizing condition and traces its fallout through five decades of American life, from the 1951 Giants-Dodgers pennant game (and the Bobby Thomson home run) to the 1990s, through garbage, nuclear waste, art, memory, and the strange connective tissue of mass culture. DeLillo opens with one of the most celebrated prologues in American fiction — the pennant game itself, rendered in 60 pages — and then moves backward and forward in time, weaving together Bronx longshoreshman Nick Shay, his wife Marian, the waste management industry, Lenny Bruce, J. Edgar Hoover, a lost Jackson Pollock, and the nuclear bomb that launched the Cold War. Underworld is DeLillo's most ambitious work, longer and denser than White Noise or Libra, and represents his fullest statement on America's peculiar relationship with death, technology, and collective memory.