The 1980s was a decade of massive social, political and cultural change. 

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Reading lists

Books that shaped the 1980s

Americana

A writer who, once you read him, makes you want to read everything he has done

DeLillo's swift, ironic, and witty cross-country nightmare doesn't have a dull or unoriginal line

Nearly every sentence rings true. DeLillo is a man of frightening perception

Witty, clever and incisive. Marvellously realised

Don DeLillo was born and raised in New York City. He has written fifteen novels and three stage plays and has won many honours including the National Book Award for White Noise, the International Fiction Prize for Libra, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for Mao II, the Jerusalem Prize, the Howells Medal for Underworld and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction.

David Bell embodies the American dream. He's twenty-eight, has survived office coups, scandals, and beaten lesser rivals, to become an extremely successful TV exec. The images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall viewers, they are of his making. 
 
But David's dream is turning sour, nightmarish. He wants reality, to touch, feel and record what is real. He takes a camera and journeys across America in a mad, roving quest to discover and capture some sense of his own and his country's past, present and future. 
 
Americana is Don DeLillo's brilliant first novel.

Libra

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An unparalleled work of historical conjecture, ranging imaginatively over huge tracts of the American popular consciousness, Don DeLillo's Libra contains an introduction by the author in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of JFK will galvanize the nation against Communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped. 
 
Don DeLillo (b.1936) was born and raised in New York City. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, Underworld (1997), hailed by Martin Amis as 'the ascension of a great writer', Cosmopolis (2003), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, due to be released later this year, and Falling Man (2007), a novel about the aftereffects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. 
 
If you enjoyed Libra, you might like DeLillo's Americana, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'Don DeLillo's apocalyptic imagination takes on the assassination of John F. Kennedy... Breathtaking' 
Newsday

The author of thirteen novels, five plays, and numerous short stories, Don DeLillo was born in 1936. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, and Underworld (1997), with its vivid portraits of actor Jackie Gleason and standup comedian Lenny Bruce.

In this powerful, eerily convincing fictional speculation on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Don DeLillo chronicles Lee Harvey Oswald's odyssey from troubled teenager to a man of precarious stability who imagines himself an agent of history. When "history" presents itself in the form of two disgruntled CIA operatives who decide that an unsuccessful attempt on the life of the president will galvanize the nation against communism, the scales are irrevocably tipped.

'He's a writer who, once you read him, makes you want to read everything he's done' Martin Amis, Sunday Times

His first novel, Don DeLillo's Americana passionately articulates the neurotic landscape of contemporary American life through a disintegrating embodiment of the American dream. 
 
Prosperous, good-looking and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell appears on the surface to have everything. But he is a man on the brink of losing his sanity. Trapped in a Manhattan office with soulless sycophants as his only company, he makes an abrupt decision to leave New York for America's mid-west. His plan: to film the small-town lives of ordinary people and make contact with the true heart of his homeland. But as Bell puts his films together in his hotel room, he grows increasingly convinced that there is no heart to find. Modern America has become a land that has reached the end of its reel... 
 
Don DeLillo (b.1936) was born and raised in New York City. Americana (1971), his first novel, announced the arrival of a major literary talent, and the novels that followed confirmed his reputation as one of the most distinctive and compelling voices in late-twentieth-century American fiction. DeLillo's comic gifts come to the fore in White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award, Underworld (1997), hailed by Martin Amis as 'the ascension of a great writer', Cosmopolis (2003), adapted into a film by David Cronenberg, due to be released later this year, and Falling Man (2007), a novel about the aftereffects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York. 
 
If you enjoyed Americana, you might like DeLillo's Libra, also available in Penguin Modern Classics. 
 
'He's a writer who, once you read him, makes you want to read everything he's done' 
Martin Amis, Sunday Times 
 
'Witty, clever and incisive ... a marvellously realized plot' 
Time Out 
 
'Nearly every sentence of Americana rings true ... DeLillo is a man of frightening perception' 
Joyce Carol Oates

Prosperous, good-looking and empty inside, 28-year-old advertising executive David Bell appears on the surface to have everything. But he is a man on the brink of losing his sanity. Trapped in a Manhattan office with soulless sycophants as his only company, he makes an abrupt decision to leave New York for America's mid-west. His plan: to film the small-town lives of ordinary people and make contact with the true heart of his homeland. But as Bell puts his films together in his hotel room, he grows increasingly convinced that there is no heart to find. Modern America has become a land that has reached the end of its reel...

Don DeLillo

Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. Friday, November 22, 1963. 12.30 PM. 
 
Shots ring out. A president dies. And a nation is plunged into psychosis. 
 
Don DeLillo's extraordinary Libra is a brilliant reimagining of the events and people surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Concentrating on the lives of Lee Harvey Oswald, some rogue former spooks unhappy with Kennedy's presidency, and Nicholas Branch, a CIA archivist, trying to make sense of or draw inferences from the mass of information after the assassination, Libra presents an unapologeticly provocative picture of America in the second half of the last century.

Don DeLillo

Libra

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