Don DeLillo and David Mamet honored by PEN

Two writers whose archives reside at the Ransom Center received 2010 PEN Literary Awards.

Novelist Don DeLillo received the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. He is the author of 15 novels, 4 plays, and a number of short stories and essays. The PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction goes to a distinguished living American author of fiction whose body of work in English possesses qualities of excellence, ambition, and scale of achievement over a sustained career, which places him or her in the highest rank of American literature.

Author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and film director David Mamet received the 2010 PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for a Master American Dramatist. Mamet is the author of more than 50 plays and 25 screenplays that have earned him a Pulitzer Prize, Oscar nominations, and a Tony Award. The PEN/Laura Pels Foundation Award for Drama recognizes a master American dramatist whose literary achievements are vividly apparent in the rich and striking language of his or her work.

“The fact that the archives of Don DeLillo and David Mamet, two of PEN’s literary award winners this year, are at the Ransom Center is a reminder of the extraordinary collections at the Center,” said Steve Isenberg, executive director of the PEN American Center, a member of the Ransom Center’s Advisory Council, and a former visiting professor of humanities at The University of Texas at Austin. “It’s wonderful that these collections are readily available to scholars, students, faculty, and the public to see firsthand.”