Don DeLillo

The son of Italian immigrants, DeLillo grew up in an Italian Catholic enclave of the Bronx, attended Fordham on scholarship, and spent five years writing copy for the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather before quitting, he has said, largely out of boredom, to write fiction instead.

He works slowly and gives few interviews, but the novels kept arriving at the center of American anxiety: Libra reimagined Lee Harvey Oswald's interior life and drew fire for humanizing a killer; Mao II anticipated the terrorist as the new century's rival to the novelist for cultural attention; Falling Man, published in 2007, was among the first major novels to confront September 11 directly.

Underworld, his sprawling 1997 epic, opens at a real 1951 Giants-Dodgers pennant game and spins outward across the entire Cold War.