J Edgar Hoover and Frank Sinatra banter with pals in the crowd. Fans, some tossing their torn-up scorecards and crushed paper cups on to the pitch, have turned out to see the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers compete for the National League pennant. In the prologue, it is 3 October 1951: the Polo Grounds, a baseball stadium in Upper Manhattan, is fizzing with excitement. “So there it was, and once I saw it there was no escape.”Īnd big Underworld certainly is. “It was a novella – I assumed perhaps 50, 60 pages … I had an idea based on a newspaper headline that I saw when I realised it was 3 October 1991, the 40th anniversary of this famous game.” Visiting a local library to check the microfilm archive, he found that the front page of the New York Times was split perfectly in two, one half reporting the Giants’ win and the other the Soviet Union’s explosion of its first nuclear bomb.
“I t was a fairly modest undertaking at first,” Don DeLillo told the Guardian live event, explaining how his 827-page novel came to be.
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