But it is widely agreed by his admirers that the next stage of DeLillo's career rang in what we might call his imperial phase. It is on the five-book run of the 1980s and 90s – The Names (1982), White Noise (1985), Libra (1988), Mao II (1991) and Underworld (1997) – that DeLillo's colossal reputation stands. These books are still about things, yes, but they also are the things themselves: highly self-aware literary works, recreations of modern society so intense that they make us see it afresh – intensely DeLillo-esque books about an intensely DeLillo-esque world.
