"It's my nature to keep quiet about most things," he told Tom LeClair; "I'm just not a public man," he added in a later interview with Anthony DeCurtis. He would also like to steer interest away from himself and his relationship to his work and focus it upon the novels themselves, novels that, he remarked to Caryn James, have "very little autobiography" in them. To DeLillo, a novel exists in the public sphere, apart from the private life of its author."I'd rather write my books in private," he told DeCurtis, "and then send them out into the world to discover their own public life."
Despite his reticence, however, some biographical details have entered the public domain. DeLillo was born on 20 November 1936 in New York City, the son of Italian immigrants. He grew up in the predominantly Italian American Fordham section of the Bronx, and he apparently led a typical boyhood centered around family and sports. Reared a Catholic, DeLillo was exposed early on to the mysteries and rituals of the church, and these had a major influence on his work. He has attributed the sense of mystery that permeates his fiction to his Catholic upbringing, as well as his fiction's concern with various forms of discipline, ritual, and spectacle--with anything, as he told LeClair, that like religion "drives people to extreme behavior." Indeed, the relentless focus of his work on the extreme in modern life--particularly on danger and death--is grounded in Catholicism.
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