Don DeLillo's work is known for addressing certain topics in depth; among these are television and consumerism. Most articles focus their attention on White Noise; however, if one reads pretty much any work by DeLillo, mass media – newspapers, radio, television, film, the internet, in addition to the mass consumption and information overload that comes with them – will be present either as a major thematic concern or a steady, omniscient buzz in the background. For the handful of texts in which it is not, particularly those of the twenty-first century, their characters often retreat to almost uninhabited and occasionally downright inhospitable settings, making the near absence of technology all the more palpable. Written before the release of The Silence (2020), this chapter demonstrates how DeLillo’s body of work – from Americana (1970) to Zero K (2016) – documents how mass media since the mid-twentieth century has helped shape individual identity, culture, and history in the USA, as well as anticipating some of the dangers mass media man poses to contemporary society.

DeLillo has often been portrayed as a “reclusive author.” Even though this characterization of the man himself is not quite accurate, DeLillo’s work is rife with images of artists as solitary geniuses who eschew the spotlight. On a structural level, that image is manifested as well in how DeLillo himself rejects the postmodernist trend toward self-reflexivity and metafictional authorial intrusions. Instead, DeLillo’s work evinces the artistry of a distant but still controlling godlike author-figure, whom his characters can sense but not see.

Examining the trajectories of paranoia and apocalypse in the matrix of Cold War dichotomies throughout DeLillo’s opus, this chapter examines DeLillo's emphasis on class and professions in relation to his Cold War fiction.

In an article on football in DeLillo’s work written for The New Yorker, Jake Nivens   discusses how the sport became “fertile material for [DeLillo's] career-long investigation of language”. The shared prominence of football within End Zone (1972) and The Silence (2020) is telling, but DeLillo’s interest in sport in general extends throughout much of his work. As Nivens suggests, language is key to how this theme develops – however, analysing sports in DeLillo’s writing more broadly may enable discussion of other aspects of his work.

Many existing studies of sport in DeLillo’s writing focus on particular depictions within particular texts. For example, the role of football in End Zone has been the subject of much critical investigation. Similarly, baseball plays a pivotal role in Underworld (1997) –most famously in its semi-autonomous prologue. Building on these studies, this chapter provides a broad overview of DeLillo’s writing on sports, tracing the ways it provides a unique corpus of work within his oeuvre. It traces the development of this theme as it oscillates in importance throughout his career, exploring the commercial and critical responses it has been subject to.