George F. Will, book critic

Today's the birthday of author Don DeLillo. Writer's Almanac notes,

DeLillo found himself fascinated by the life of Lee Harvey Oswald, who had lived at 179th Street in the Bronx while DeLillo was growing up just a little to the east, on 182nd Street. He spent a few years researching Oswald before deciding to write a novel about him, Libra (1988), which speculates about Oswald’s childhood and the events leading up to Oswald’s assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. It was a best-seller, though conservative columnist George Will called the book “an affront to America” and “an act of literary vandalism and bad citizenship.”