DeLillo was born on November 20, 1936 and grew up in a working-class Italian Catholic family, from Molise, in an Italian-American neighborhood of the Bronx in New York City, not far from Arthur Avenue [REF].
After graduating from Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx in 1954 and from Fordham University in the Bronx with a bachelor's degree in Communication Arts in 1958, DeLillo took a job in advertising because he couldn't get one in publishing.