Underworld - by Don Delillo (Paperback)

About the Book

A gloriously fused history of the past 50 years that offers a key to understanding American culture, "Underworld" moves through the nation's diverse landscapes, analyzing the mesmerizing interplay between two central characters, and "(offering) us another history of ourselves, the unofficial underground moments" (Michael Ondaatje). A National Book Award Finalist.

Book Synopsis

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
Finalist for the National Book Award
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
Winner of the Howell's Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

"A great American novel" (San Francisco Chronicle) that spans five decades of American history, following the intimate lives of the men and women who lived through them.

It begins with a moment of legend: the 1951 baseball game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in which the winning homerun known as the Shot Heard Round the World coincides with news of the Soviet Union's first hydrogen bomb test.

The baseball itself, scuffed and passed from hand to hand, becomes the thread that weaves an astonishing tapestry that spans the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam protests, and beyond, telling the story of Nick Shay, Klara Sax, and the hidden histories of a nation both haunted and illuminated by its past.

Sweeping yet intimate, Underworld is an astonishing story of men and women brought together and torn apart against the backdrop of half a century of American history.

Review Quotes

"His best novel and perhaps that most elusive of creatures, a great American novel... a masterpiece in which the depth and reach of the commonplace are invested with universal scope and grandeur. Underworld is also a thrilling page-turner." --David Wiegand, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

"Underworld surges with magisterial confidence through time and through space." --Martin Amis, The New York Times Book Review

"The sheer size of the imaginative act and the beauty of its imagery are what is so impressive about this novel.... Underworld is a magnificent book by an American master." --Salman Rushdie

"Utterly extraordinary ... in its epic ambition and accomplishment, Underworld calls out for comparison with works that have defined the consciousness of their age." --Melvin Jules Bukiet, Chicago Tribune Books

"You pick up and travel with DeLillo anywhere--the bliss of a baseball game, the meeting of old lovers in a desert. He offers us another history of ourselves. He smells the music in argument and brag. He throws the unbitten coin of fame back at us. This book is an aria and a wolf-whistle of our half-century. It contains multitudes." --Michael Ondaatje

"DeLillo understands the capacity of words to elevate us above the mundane, to establish a distance from things and a mastery over them, a power emerging from the capacity given to Adam, the ability to name." --Steven E. Alford, Houston Chronicle

"Reading DeLillo's books bolsters our belief in the art of fiction: one bright shining sentence after another." --Paul Elie, Elle

"For those who love eloquent prose and powerful ideas, Underworld is an eight-course meal. .. . A n eye-opener, a consciousness-raising treatise on modern America by a writer in love with the power of words." --Dorman T. Shindler, The Denver Post

"Underworld soars. Bigger and richer than anything Do n DeLillo has done before, this multicharacter, time-leaping, sea-to-shining-sea dissection of American life is perilously good--so good, so strong, deep, knowing and funny." --Phil Hanrahan, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Underworld, DeLillo's richest and most ambitious novel, seeks nothing less than the secret truths of modern America. " --Gary Lee Stonum, The Plain Dealer

About the Author

Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including Underworld, Zero K, Libra, and White Noise, and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda, a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He has also written plays and essays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work, the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, in 2025, the Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction. DeLillo has been awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.