Beauty After 9/11: Don DeLillo in New York

Two months after the September 11 attacks, Don DeLillo—Brooklyn-born, dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, chronicler of postmodern American life in that city and elsewhere—wrote an essay tided “In the Ruins of the Future” on the subject of the terror events.1 In that essay, this grieving and traumatized New Yorker described the desperation of his nephew and his nephew’s family as they saved themselves from the ash and toxic air of the World Trade Center site, only blocks from their apartment. But he framed this personal account with a larger set of arguments about what the attack meant and what the novelist might be able to offer us in the wake of such an event.