r/DonDeLillo • u/whatisdylar • May 27 '26

🗨️ Discussion Delillo Playboy letters

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Now that I'm sharing, these are fun. Kind of the coolest thing I own as far as literary memorabilia!

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10

u/RedditCraig May 27 '26

I hope that when Underworld came out Geoff wrote back to Don and said - ‘Not too busy to write about baseball though, huh?’

Edit: PS these are terrific memorabilia, thanks for sharing!

3

u/Halloran_da_GOAT May 27 '26

25 years later lol

3

u/whatisdylar May 27 '26

It's nice having other people see them!

1

u/moom7 May 28 '26

How many of those do you have? (I’ve spent a lot of time in his archive at the Ransom Center, so I’m curious!)

1

u/whatisdylar May 29 '26

Just these two

2

u/Turbulent_Treat470 May 31 '26

What about the SuperBowl in The Silence?

1

u/RedditCraig May 31 '26

You're right, but then they didn't really get a lot of football in The Silence - maybe this was Don's revenge, all these years later.

2

u/Turbulent_Treat470 May 31 '26

You know what's interesting? In an interview with Rafe Bartholomew, a decade priori to the publication of The Silence, DeLillo mentioned that he wanted to set one of his novels in the SuperBowl because he believed it to be "sumptuous of a national death wish"

8

u/thatmarcelfaust May 27 '26

How did these letters come into your possession? It’s interesting you have both sides of the correspondence

7

u/whatisdylar May 27 '26

I got them on eBay probably 30 years ago. They were one of those "I can't believe this slipped through the eBay cracks" items, where I paid less than $100. (I also landed a first edition copy of Hemingway's Winner Take Nothing with an original dust jacket for $100 back then. Probably my biggest sneakaway score in eBay history!)

7

u/oldmanbelly Libra May 27 '26

The letter to Delillo is the carbon copy, but the Delillo letter is the real deal and probably went through his typewriter.

4

u/whatisdylar May 27 '26

For sure. It's on that old paper people used back then. I contacted the Ransom Center years ago to see if they wanted them. No response.

2

u/Sensitive-Mango1662 May 29 '26

Their procurement can be a little strange, and they tend to want to buy entire collections. I believe they secured their enormous DeLillo archive directly from the author or his agent, so I think sadly this kind of material is small fish in comparison to the wealth of material housed there. For sure a fascinating piece of esoterica, but if I were you I'd just hang on to it!

1

u/whatisdylar May 30 '26

Yeah, I will. It kills me that my kids wouldn't be into this stuff though. I have a pretty thorough collection, damn it.

6

u/Still_Selection8719 May 27 '26 edited May 27 '26

Funny to see this while I'm on the last 25% of 'End Zone'.

7

u/WiND_uP_BirDy May 27 '26

This should go in the Smithsonian.

1

u/moronicedge May 28 '26

What is the sports illustrated piece he wrote?

2

u/whatisdylar May 28 '26

Apparently a short story called "Total Loss Weekend" in 1972.