In Episode Seventeen, DDSWTNP briefly discuss new Nobel Laureate Han Kang before digging into “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” DeLillo’s acceptance speech for an award he did win, the 1999 Jerusalem Prize. In this unpublished, hard-to-find text, DeLillo tells the humbling story of the novelist at frustratingly slow work, “shaped by the vast social reality that rumbles all around him,” in a narrative that conjures scenes that resonate with Libra, Mao II, and other of DeLillo’s portraits of the artist (while also raising the question of whether DeLillo has a cat). Novelists Thomas Mann, Philip Roth, and William Gaddis make their way into our analysis of this miniature fiction, and we consider as well the meaning of the Jerusalem Prize, the “nonchalant terror” of everyday life, and the young woman writer the essay at its end envisions taking up this legacy of lonely work.

Texts mentioned or cited in this episode:

Don DeLillo, “A History of the Writer Alone in a Room,” 1999 Jerusalem Prize For the Freedom of the Individual in Society acceptance address. Jerusalem: Jerusalem International Book Fair, 1999. Reprinted in German translation (“Der Narr in seinem Zimmer”) in Die Zeit (March 29, 2001). See also: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog?op=AND&sort=score+desc%2C+pub_date_si+desc%2C+title_si+asc&search_field=advanced&all_fields_advanced=&child_oids_ssim=17371596&commit=SEARCH

---. “On William Gaddis.” Conjunctions (Issue 41, Fall 2003). https://web.archive.org/web/20031123133017/http://www.conjunctions.com/archives/c41-dd.htm

[Incorrectly placed in Bookforum in the episode.]

---. “The Artist Naked in a Cage.” The New Yorker, May 26, 1997.

“Don DeLillo: The Word, the Image, the Gun.” Dir. Kim Evans. BBC Documentary, September 27, 1991. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4029096/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTePKA1wgc&t=63s

William Gaddis, The Recognitions. Harcourt Brace & Co., 1955.