Speaking by telephone from his home in the New York City suburbs, Don DeLillo said he spent three years researching and writing ''Libra,'' a fictional biography of Lee Harvey Oswald, as a way of filling in the painful gaps in our knowledge To the conspirators, Oswald is no more than a useful idiot in their complicated scheme. To history, his role is that of minor infamy, one man in a never-ending series of American “lone nut” shooters and bombers. To DeLillo, however, he is the novel’s pivotal antihero (Oswald being a Libra, the astrological sign for which is the scales of justice). A protagonist with not just one doppelgänger but a multitude of them, Oswald finally offers DeLillo a character sufficiently fragmented and manipulated for a fictional paradigm trying to grasp the misfitting puzzle pieces of a fragmented world. as a boy in the Bronx - a misfit, a chronic truant, sharing oppressively close quarters with his mother. Then there's a brief intermission: a glimpse into the book-filled, document-choked study of Nicholas Branch, who is writing a it's not at all like that. It's an eerie sense of getting close to the man himself. It's a sense of history, but of a peculiar kind -a history on the margins, a history that people don't really want to know.''

The mode of White Noise – like much of DeLillo's mature work – is postmodernism: fragmented, subjective, layered with extra-literary elements. The words that come from the TV and radio are presented like dialogue, as though those devices are characters, fully paid-up members of the household. ("The TV said, 'And other trends that could dramatically impact your portfolio.'") The self-referential media mash of DeLillo's world, where brand names become a mantra (the working title for White Noise was Panasonic, but he was refused permission to use it), makes perfect sense in the 21st Century, where our experiences are endlessly processed, photographed, commented on, reshaped and shared. It's a world that has seen, as the British writer Gordon Burn put it in his book Best and Edwards, "the electronic society of the image – the daily bath we all take in the media – replace the real community of the crowd." DeLillo's vision never flinches, never looks away, which may be why his work can seem cold in its unsentimental approach to human horror. We see it in The Names, filming terrorist murders; in White Noise, separating Hitler from his actions through the academic fetish of Hitler studies; in Falling Man, where the book is centred on the iconography of one of the men who jumped from the twin towers. His books riff on cults and death and mass murder, which are a part of life. "Life must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound," says a character in Mao II; once again, DeLillo saw what was coming. White Noise's influence can be seen in the writing of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Lethem, Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Zadie Smith and Richard Powers (who provides an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of the novel). [25] Among the 39 proposed titles for the novel were "All Souls", "Ultrasonic", [20] "The American Book of the Dead", "Psychic Data" and "Mein Kampf". [29] In 2005 DeLillo said "White Noise" was a fine choice, adding, "Once a title is affixed to a book, it becomes as indelible as a sentence or a paragraph." [29] His own theory, while at odds with the Warren Commission's, nevertheless discounts conspiracy in favor of a motivation embedded in coincidence, intuition and astrology - hence the book's title. ''Certainly,'' he said, ''I with the inequities of capitalism, or his extensive readings in Marxism, you catch a glimmer of intelligence. ''I'm not an innocent youth who thinks Russia is the land of his dreams,'' he tells one Russian.It's in those commonplace moments that Mr. DeLillo reveals his genius. After all, he must have had the same source materials available to anyone else - the Warren Commission report, the usual newspaper articles and court proceedings. But he takes In ''American Blood,'' an article published by Rolling Stone magazine in 1983, Mr. DeLillo suggested that the John Kennedy assassination was ''a story about our uncertain grip on the world - a story exploded into life by In a February 21, 2010, interview with The Times, DeLillo reaffirmed his belief in the validity and importance of the novel in a technology- and media-driven age, offering a more optimistic opinion of the future of the novel than his contemporary Philip Roth had done in a recent interview:

This section needs to be updated. Please help update this article to reflect recent events or newly available information. ( January 2023) sometimes unwittingly comic stream of talk, was probably willing to speak to any newsman who poked a microphone in her face; and therefore Mr. DeLillo had merely to transcribe her long-ago monologues. Or did he? Other voices are equallyIn the book, it is told that the assassination was meant to fail, plotted by old CIA operatives that want the US government to start a war with Cuba. Oswald is part of the Communist party, so it is hard to fit in with the rest of his American peers. Surprising, he is not portrayed as "bad", but his "good" side is not overly extrapolated. Instead, DeLillo brings a neutral account, indicating that Oswald was not insane, but not a genius, loving but not perfect. Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports. In The Names DeLillo also noted the rise of terrorism as a focus of the Western world's attention: the plot features a sect that kills people based on their names – and, in a horribly prescient take on the extremes of human appetites, one character wants to film the murders taking place.

Authenticating the research was another matter. ''It's legitimate in the sense that it appeared somewhere in print or on sound tapes or film. Beyond that, you're on your own,'' he said. (Thus the careful choice of words when the stale facts and weaves them into something altogether new, largely by means of inventing, with what seems uncanny perception, the interior voice that each character might use to describe his own activities. Here, for instance,Since 1979, in addition to his novels and occasional essays, DeLillo has been active as a playwright. To date, DeLillo has written five major plays: The Engineer of Moonlight (1979), The Day Room (1986), Valparaiso (1999), Love Lies Bleeding (2006), and, most recently, The Word For Snow (2007). Stage adaptations have also been written for DeLillo's novels Libra and Mao II. a morass of eyewitness accounts, hair samples, chemical analyses, then the accounts of the dreams of eyewitnesses and then 25 years of novels and plays and radio debates about the assassination. He's not really part of the story, him to go where the facts could not. ''In this version, we know how it happened, so the novel, working within history, is also outside it, correcting, clearing up, finding balances and rhythms. I think readers are willing to