White noise

Chronology

1936 Donald Richard DeLillo born on November 20 in the Bronx, New York, to Italian immigrant parents. During childhood moves to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and then back to the Bronx. Grows up in two-story house near the corner of 182nd Street and Adams Place.

1950-54 Attends Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx.

1954-58 Attends Fordham University. Graduates with a degree in communication arts in 1958.

1959 Lives in small apartment in Murray Hill, New York City, and works as a copywriter for Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency.

1960 Publishes first story, "The River Jordan," in Epoch magazine. 1962 Publishes "Take the 'A' Train" in Epoch.

1964 Quits ad agency job. Earns livelihood by taking freelance assignments.

1965 Publishes "Spaghetti and Meatballs" in Epoch.

1966 Begins works on first novel, Americana. Publishes "Coming Sun. Mon. Tues." in Kenyon Review.

1968 Publishes "Baghdad Towers West" in Epoch.

1970 Publishes "The Uniforms" in Carolina Quarterly.

1971 Publishes Americana. Devotes himself to full-time writing. Begins novel, End Zone. Publishes "In the Men's Room of the Sixteenth Century" in Esquire.

1972 Publishes End Zone. Essay about sports gambling, "Total Loss Weekend," appears in Sports Illustrated.

1973 Publishes novel, Great Jones Street.

1975 Marries Barbara Bennett, a landscape designer. Moves to Toronto, Canada, where he lives until 1976.

1976 Publishes novel, Ratner's Star.

1977 Publishes novel, Players.

1978 Publishes novel, Running Dog.

1979 Receives a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he uses to travel to Greece, and begins work on novel The Names. Publishes story, "Creation," in Antaeus. Publishes play, The Engineer of Moonlight, in Cornell Review (the play has never been performed).

1982 Publishes The Names. Settles with wife just outside New York City. Late in the year begins White Noise.

1983 Essay on the Kennedy assassination, "American Blood: A Journey through the Labyrinth of Dallas and JFK," appears in Rolling Stone. Publishes "Human Moments in World War III" in Esquire.

1984 Receives Award in Literature from American Academy of Arts and Letters. Finishes White Noise; begins Libra.

1985 Publishes White Noise in January.

1986 Receives National Book Award for White Noise. Second play, The Day Room, premieres in April at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1987 Publishes The Day Room, which is performed in December at Manhattan Theater Club in New York.

1988 Publishes novel, Libra, which wins Irish Times-Aer Lingus International Fiction Prize. Libra is nominated for National Book Award and chosen as main selection of Book-of-the-Month Club; reaches New York Times best-seller list. Essay on Nazism, "Silhouette City: Hitler, Manson and the Millennium," appears in Dimensions, the journal of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith. Publishes story, "The

Runner," in Harper's. Publishes "The Ivory Acrobat" in Granta.

1989 In March, begins novel, Mao II, partly in response to Aya-tollah Khomeini's fatwa condemning novelist Salman Rushdie to death.

1990 Publishes playlet, "The Rapture of the Athlete Assumed into Heaven," in The Quarterly.

1991 Publishes Mao II.

1992 Mao II wins PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

1994 Publishes, with novelist Paul Auster, pamphlet in defense of Salman Rushdie. Actor John Malkovich adapts and directs theatrical production of Libra at Steppenwolf in Chicago in May.

1996 Scribner acquires manuscript of Underworld.

1997 In May, participates in New York Public Library event, "Stand In for Wei Jingsheng," where he reads "The Artist Naked in a Cage," later published in the New Yorker. In September, publishes essay, "The Power of History," discussing the origins of Underworld, in the New York Times Magazine. In October, Underworld published to wide acclaim. Is nominated for National Book Award, reaches New York Times best-seller list and is chosen as main selection of Book-of-the-Month Club.

I

The Text

White Noise

To Sue Buck and to Lois Wallace

I

Waves and Radiation

1

The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus. In single file they eased around the orange I-beam sculpture and moved toward the dormitories. The roofs of the station wagons were loaded down with carefully secured suitcases full of light and heavy clothing; with boxes of blankets, boots and shoes, stationery and books, sheets, pillows, quilts; with rolled-up rugs and sleeping bags; with bicycles, skis, rucksacks, English and Western saddles, inflated rafts. As cars slowed to a crawl and stopped, students sprang out and raced to the rear doors to begin removing the objects inside; the stereo sets, radios, personal computers; small refrigerators and table ranges; the cartons of phonograph records and cassettes; the hairdryers and styling irons; the tennis rackets, soccer balls, hockey and lacrosse sticks, bows and arrows; the controlled substances, the birth control pills and devices; the jurik food still in shopping bags—onion-and-garlic chips, nacho thins, peanut creme patties, Waffelos and Kabooms, fruit chews and toffee popcorn; the Dum-Dum pops, the Mystic mints.

I've witnessed this spectacle every September for twenty-one years. It is a brilliant event, invariably. The students greet each other with comic cries and gestures of sodden collapse. Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always. The parents stand sun-dazed near their automobiles, seeing images of themselves in every direction. The conscientious suntans. The well-made faces and wry looks. They feel a sense of renewal, of communal recognition. The women crisp and alert, in diet trim, knowing people's names. Their husbands content to measure out the time, distant but ungrudging, accomplished in parenthood, something about them suggesting massive insurance coverage. This assembly of station wagons, as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation.

I left my office and walked down the hill and into town. There are houses in town with turrets and two-story porches where people sit in the shade of ancient maples. There are Greek revival and Gothic churches. There is an insane asylum with an elongated portico, ornamented dormers and a steeply pitched roof topped by a pineapple finial. Babette and I and our children by previous marriages live at the end of a quiet street in what was once a wooded area with deep ravines. There is an expressway beyond the backyard now, well below us, and at night as we settle into our brass bed the sparse traffic washes past, a remote and steady murmur around our sleep, as of dead souls babbling at the edge of a dream.

I am chairman of the department of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. I invented Hitler studies in North America in March of 1968. It was a cold bright day with intermittent winds out of the east. When I suggested to the chancellor that we might build a whole department around Hitler's life and work, he was quick to see the possibilities. It was an immediate and electrifying success. The chancellor went on to serve as adviser to Nixon, Ford and Carter before his death on a ski lift in Austria.

At Fourth and Elm, cars turn left for the supermarket. A policewoman crouched inside a boxlike vehicle patrols the area looking for cars parked illegally, for meter violations, lapsed inspection stickers. On telephone poles all over town there are homemade signs concerning lost dogs and cats, sometimes in the handwriting of a child.