Henry Veggian

Henry Veggian introduces readers to one of the most influential American writers of the last half- century. Winner of the National Book Award, American Book Award, and the first Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Don DeLillo is the author of short stories, screenplays, and fifteen novels, including his breakthrough work White Noise (1985) and Pulitzer Prize finalists Mao II (1992) and Underworld (1998). Veggian traces the evolution of DeLillo's work through the three phases of his career as a fiction writer, from the experimental early novels, through the critically acclaimed works of the mid-1980s and 1990s, into the smaller but newly innovative novels of the last decade. He guides readers to DeLillo's principal concerns - the tension between biography and anonymity, the blurred boundary between fiction and historical narrative, and the importance of literary authorship in opposition to various structures of power - and traces the evolution of his changing narrative techniques. Beginning with a brief biography, an introduction to reading strategies, and a survey of the major concepts and questions concerning DeLillo's work, Veggian proceeds chronologically through his major novels. His discussion summarizes complicated plots, reflects critical responses to the author's work, and explains the literary tools used to fashion his characters, narrators, and events. In the concluding chapter Veggian engages notable examples of DeLillo's other modes, particularly the short stories that reveal important insights into his "modular" working method as well as the evolution of his novels.

I. Two historical veins course through the study of modern military intelligence. The first derives from an anthropological model of history. The proponents of this school, which includes writers such as the historian David Kahn and the journalist/historian James Bamford, have argued that civilian men and women made the modem military intelligence agencies.1 In the United States, mese women and men (and the primary examples are nearly always William and Elizebeth Friedman) transformed the archaic U.S. military intelligence techniques that had stagnated since the Civil War; they did so primarily by lifting cryptology (the science of codes and ciphers) out from its amateur literary residence and adapting it to quantified methods and mechanized instruments of new military and industrial institutions. In both their rhetorical figures and their scientific models, the prime movers in these historical works are always human beings. A second school of thought favors the anonymous engineerin...

In one of the largely forgotten chapters of twentieth-century European history, Tito's communist soldiers systematically eradicated Italian populations from the Italian coastal cities of Dalmatia, Istria, and Venezia-Giulia during and after WWII. The strategy was simple: kill ...

This early essay examines the work of two early 20th century intellectuals from the University of Chicago. The first was professor and scholar Edith Rickert and the second was John Matthews Manly,  a renowned Chaucer scholar and president of the MLA. Both had worked in the first modern "Black Chamber", an early Signal Intelligence branch of the U.S. Department of War, and both had ties to the cryptologists of the Riverbank Laboratories in Illinois. This essay hypothesizes that Rickert and Manly attempted to translate the intellectual practices of cryptology to literary methods, anticipating in some ways the turn to formalist reading practices in Anglo-American literary criticism.

This is a selection of articles I published in the Italian-American newspaper America Oggi over the course of roughly one decade (1997-2006). Articles of literary note include an interview with Bunny Kuiken, granddaughter of Pietro Botto, regarding the Botto House and the National Labor Museum, and an article about the Italian-American novelist Helen Barolini.

Professor Jennifer Larson and Professor Henry Veggian read from their books for the Understanding American Literature series at the Bulls Head Bookstore on November 19, 2014, at 3:30 pm. Professor Jennifer Larson reads from Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks (1:00), and Professor Veggian reads from Understanding Don DeLillo (14:20). Both professors answer questions at the end of the presentation (42:30).

This file contains two film reviews I wrote during the early 1990's for an film industry newspaper that no longer exists (its name was NY/LA Casting). While I was not the most inventive writer at that time in my career, I post them because they represent a prescient view of early films by two young foreign directors who would later achieve great influence and success, and thus the reviews have some historical value with regards to first notices of the two cinematic works. A third review, of Spike Lee's Crooklyn, has been lost.