After completing his studies at Fordham University, DeLillo lived in New York and Canada. Through a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, he is currently in Greece at work on a novel.
In DeLillo's first novel, Americana (1971), David Bell, twenty-eight-year-old hireling of a television network, tells his own story. Bell is caught up in a career he finds increasingly meaningless and is nagged by the failure of his marriage. He then does what so many American fictional heroes have done--he lights out on a spiritual odyssey meant to renew the flagging soul. For Bell the opportunity arises when he is assigned to do a documentary film on the Navaho Indians. He insists on making the trip west by car, for "cars are religious now and this is a religious trip."
In New York Bell recruits Jack Watson Pike, a sixty-year-old chain smoker "fascinated by animals," and an enigmatic young woman sculptor known only as Sullivan. The three of them drive to Maine's Penobscot Bay, where they stop at Bobby Brand's "ascetic garage." Brand, an old Buddy of Bell's, is "a one-man dispensary of meth, acid, hashish and various amphetamines."
A week on the road in Brand's pickup-camper truck finds them in Fort Curtis, somewhere in Middle America, and at the very heart of their "mysterious and sacramental journey." They meet various people here: a skinny teenager walking across the country whom Bell renames Kyrie Eleison; several devotees of the drama from McCompex--the McDowd Communications Arts Complex; and Glenn and Bud Yost, father and son, who raise bloodworms.
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