Don DeLillo’s Secret 7th Novel

Over at The Weeklings, Victoria Patterson, author of The Peerless Four, revives a novel that Don DeLillo wanted to kill. During an interview, Patterson remarked on the absence of athletic female protagonists in “so-called classic sports novels by men.” She was quickly directed to Amazons: An Intimate Memoir by the First Woman Ever to Play in the National Hockey League by Cleo Birdwell, a pseudonym of Don DeLillo.

Amazons was Delillo’s seventh novel, and it sold better than his previous books and doubled his income, all before he earned his reputation as one of America’s greatest writers.

Whether from embarrassment, personal reasons, a game he’s playing with his readers, or other reasons I can’t fathom, Delillo doesn’t want his name attached to the book and has never officially acknowledged writing it. He asked Viking to expunge the book from White Noise’s bibliography and won’t grant permission for the novel’s reprinting.

Head over to The Weeklings to read plenty of phallic quotes and see some of the bawdy covers for this “penis-sex-sports-obsessed memoir.”