Don DeLillo's America came online on February 3, 1996. I created the site for two reasons: I couldn't find much of anything about DeLillo on the web at that time, and I wanted to learn html. At that time I was using Lynx, a text-only browser, which meant that I kept the design very simple. I have heard from a few appreciative visitors who couldn't read the site but have software to read the text aloud, so the design will stay as it is.
For a long time this site was the #1 Google site for 'DeLillo', but in late 2006 the Wikipedia entry on DeLillo took over that slot.
Here are some milestones from the heady days of the mid-nineties!
If you want to see how the site looked back in 1997, try this link. Courtesy of the Way Back Machine!
"I knew who I was on the network of meaning," says Jack Gladney in Don DeLillo's White Noise. At this one-year-old site, DeLillo enthusiasts can situate this reclusive novelist. The site is a trove of biographical and publication info, intelligently organized and illuminated with cover art. Indeed, prolonged exposure makes one think of a DeLillo novel writ small: interview excerpts stand in for the stark pleasures of his writing, and one's obsessive pursuit of information uncannily mirrors a signature D.D. character trait. Lost, engrossed, perhaps slightly crazed, the visitor may come to decide, like the J.F.K.-hit historian in Libra, that "it is essential to master the data."