Although celebrated as a great postmodernist, Don DeLillo resists the label. As he told an interviewer in 1998:

Reluctant to classify his work, DeLillo nonetheless admits an affinity to modernism. He has a point. Because DeLillo seeks the epic in the mundane, embraces a modernist avant-garde, writes a tightly controlled prose, and densely layers his allusive novels, modernism may be at least as important as postmodernism for understanding DeLillo's achievement.

For the richness of his language and the scope of his literary ambition, James Joyce looms largest in DeLillo's imagination. As he said in 1993, “it was through Joyce that I learned to see something in language that carried a radiance, something that made me feel the beauty and fervor of words, the sense that a word has a life and a history.” Although Joycean turns of phrase recur throughout his work, DeLillo's earliest novels make the most conspicuous allusions. In Americana (1971), for example, several major characters demonstrate detailed knowledge of either Ulysses (1922) or Finnegans Wake (1939).