Edgar Hoover, watching in the stands, is informed in the middle of the game of the first Soviet test of the hydrogen bomb. In DeLillo's account, the game-winning ball is caught by a young black fan named Cotter Martin, while J. The prologue is a fictionalized account of The Shot Heard 'Round the World, a home run by Bobby Thomson on October 3, 1951, that won the National League pennant for the New York Giants against their cross-town rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers.
DeLillo has said that the front page of The New York Times on October 4, 1951, inspired Underworld. Background įollowing the publication of the well-regarded novels White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), and Mao II (1991), DeLillo made few public appearances and published little for several years while writing Underworld, besides the folio short story Pafko at the Wall which was incorporated into the prologue of Underworld with minor changes.Īccording to DeLillo, the novel's title came to him as he thought about radioactive waste buried deep underground and about Pluto, the god of death. In 2006, a survey of eminent authors and critics conducted by The New York Times named Underworld as the runner-up for the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years, behind only Toni Morrison's Beloved. Described as both postmodernist and a reaction to postmodernism, it examines themes of nuclear proliferation, waste, and the contribution of individual lives to the course of history.Ī best-seller that was nominated for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize, Underworld is often regarded as DeLillo's supreme achievement.
The novel is centered on the efforts of Nick Shay, a waste management executive who grew up in the Bronx, to trace the history of the baseball that won the New York Giants the pennant in 1951, and encompasses numerous subplots drawn from American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Underworld is a 1997 novel by American writer Don DeLillo.
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