Don DeLillo

DeLillo wrote advertising copy at an agency before fiction and has said the job taught him nothing except how to get out of it. White Noise put a professor who has built a department around a single twentieth-century tyrant, and a chemical spill, in the same American town and won a National Book Award in 1985. Libra reconstructs Lee Harvey Oswald; Underworld opens on a baseball game and runs backwards through the Cold War for eight hundred pages. He rarely gives interviews and once handed a reporter a card that read I don't want to talk about it. The Silence is short and set during a sudden global blackout.