DeLillo's early novels were about things – advertising (Americana, 1971), sport (End Zone, 1972), rock music (Great Jones Street, 1973). Later in the 1970s he began to grow and experiment more: novels like Ratner's Star (1976), Players (1977) and Running Dog (1978) were playful, intricate and increasingly uninterested in forcing DeLillo's talents into standard literary forms: they mashed up elements of science fiction, thrillers and satire with big-brain subjects (astronomy, economics, social history). And they started to win him a reputation: "There's Norman Mailer, there's Thomas Pynchon, now there's Don DeLillo," gasped the Los Angeles Times on the paperback cover of Running Dog.
