Don DeLillo

Don DeLillo, one of the country’s most celebrated authors of novels, short stories, plays and essays, will give Davidson College’s annual Conarroe lecture on Monday, Feb. 17.

Also, NC Poet Laureate Joseph Bathanti will be at Main Street Books on Sunday. See below. 

DeLillo’s presentation begins at 8pm in Duke Family Performance Hall. It’s free, but tickets are required. They’ll be available beginning Thursday, Feb. 13, at the Alvarez College Union ticket office, which is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Alvarez College Union ticket office. Tickets will also be available for a $3 convenience fee by calling the ticket office at 704-894-2135, or ordering online at www.davidson.edu/tickets ^[1].

Since the publication of his first novel, “Americana,” in 1971, DeLillo has become one of the most important writers of his generation. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In 1999, he became the first American recipient of the Jerusalem Prize, awarded to writers whose work expresses the theme of the freedom of the individual in society.

His novel “White Noise” won the National Book Award in 1985, while “Mao II” won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1991. DeLillo also won the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010. He received the 2012 Carl Sandburg Literary Award “in recognition of outstanding contributions to the literary world and honors a significant work or body of work that has enhanced the public’s awareness of the written word.”

Just last year he won the inaugural Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. The award seeks to commend “strong, unique, enduring voices that – throughout long, consistently accomplished careers – have told us something about the American experience.”

Already the subject of several books, DeLillo, 77, has achieved international prominence for his novels, plays, and short stories that powerfully engage the political, historical, and philosophical issues of our time. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language and terrorism.

In a 2005 interview he declared, “Writers must oppose systems. It’s important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments. I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.”

He also said of his work, “I don’t offer comforts except those that lurk in comedy and in structure and in language, and the comedy is probably not all that soothing. But before history and politics there’s language. And it’s language, the sheer pleasure of making it and bending it and seeing it form on the page and hearing it whistle in my head—this is the thing that makes my work go. And art can be exhilarating despite the darkness.”

DeLillo lives in the New York City suburb of Bronxville. He is currently working on his 16th novel, whose main character “spends a lot of time watching file footage on a wide screen, images of a disaster.”

He graduated from Fordham University with a bachelor’s degree in Communication Arts in 1958, and worked for several years as a copywriter in an advertising agency. In 1964. DeLillo published his first short story, and began to work on his first novel in 1966 at age 30. Reflecting on his relatively late start in writing fiction, DeLillo said “I wish I had started earlier, but evidently I wasn’t ready. First, I lacked ambition. Second, I didn’t have a sense of what it takes to be a serious writer. It took me a long time to develop this.”

The Conarroe Lecture Series at Davidson is named in honor of Joel Conarroe, a 1956 Davidson graduate and distinguished member of the professional literary community who served as president of PEN American Center, president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and executive director of the Modern Language Association.

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates inaugurated the Conarroe Lectureship in 2002, and those who followed her include some of the most notable authors of this era—Michael Cunningham, Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Annie Proulx, Michael Chabon, Russell Banks, Margaret Atwood, W.S. Merwin and Edward Hirsch.

Joseph Bathanti

POET LAUREATE AT MAIN STREET BOOKS