A darkly funny satire of human nature and American college football, set against the backdrop of the Cold War, by the author of the National Book Award–winning novel White Noise At Logos College in West Texas, huge young men, vacuum-packed into shoulder pads and shiny helmets, play football with intense passion. During an uncharacteristic winning season, the perplexed and distracted running back Gary Harkness has periodic fits of nuclear glee, fueled by his fear of and fascination with nuclear conflict. As the line between football and nuclear warfare blurs, the actions of the players become unorthodox and even bizarre, reflecting the disconcerting reality of a world teetering on the brink of destruction. In this triumphantly funny, deeply searching novel, Don DeLillo explores the metaphor of football as war with rich, original zeal. Don DeLillo's second novel, a sort of Dr. Strangelove meets North Dallas Forty , solidified his place in the American literary landscape in the early 1970s. The story of an angst-ridden, war-obsessed running back for Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is a heady and hilarious conflation of Cold War existentialism and the parodied parallelism of battlefield/sports rhetoric. When not arguing nuclear endgame strategy with his professor, Major Staley, narrator Gary Harkness joins a brilliant and unlikely bunch of overmuscled gladiators on the field and in the dormitory. In characteristic fashion, DeLillo deliberately undermines the football-is-combat cliché by having one of his characters explain: "I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing." What remains is an insightful examination of language in an alien, postmodern world, where a football player's ultimate triumph is his need to play the game. Praise for End Zone : "We've got the real thing in Don DeLillo. This is a wondrous work by an inventive talent." — The Philadelphia Inquirer  "Wonderful . . . [ End Zone ] makes one wonder whether there are any limits at all to [DeLillo's] potential growth." — The New York Times "Powerfully funny, oblique, testy, and playful, tearing along in dazzling cinematic spurts . . . A masterful novel."  — The Washington Post "Taut, witty, and resonant. The dialogue is sweaty and true."  — The Boston Globe Don DeLillo has written seventeen novels, including White Noise , which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra , his bestselling novel about the assassination of President Kennedy; Mao II , which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and the bestselling Underworld , which in 2000 won the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction published in the prior five years. In 1999, DeLillo was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of freedom of the individual in society. His other books include the novels Cosmopolis, Falling Man , and Point Omega and the story collection The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories . He has also written occasional essays and three stage plays. In 2010 DeLillo became the third author to receive the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. He was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2013.