Time period: Fall 1951 - Summer 1952
DeLillo on a playground on East 182nd Street in the Bronx. Photo by Nigel Parry, from Vanity Fair, Sept. 1997.
From the Hungry Mind Review interview with Gerald Howard:
...the Bronx episodes in Part Six particularly were written out of a sense of intimate knowledge. Something I discovered after I finished writing the book, as I was reading the proofs, is that much of the book is nearly saturated with compound words, hyphenated words, many of them which I invented or grafted together. In Part Six, suddenly the language is a bit different. It's a bit simpler. It's more visceral. And it occurs to me that this is what a writer does to transcend the limitations of his background. He does it through language, obviously. He writes himself into the larger world. He opens himself to the entire culture.
DeLillo makes a point of mentioning the row
house at number 607 (756) - I feel some connection to the Libra
dedication:
"To the boys at 607 - Tony, Dick and Ron"
There's another quick gesture to an early DeLillo story.
Someone was evicted, put out on the street, chairs, tables, bed, right around the corner -- the bed, John said, the super. Frame, spring, mattress, pillows, out on the sidewalk. (768)
Sounds just like the 1965 story "Spaghetti and Meatballs."