End Zone

A light-hearted farce that foreshadows much of DeLillo's later, more mature work.

End Zone is Don DeLillo's second novel, published in 1972. It is a light-hearted farce that foreshadows much of his later, more mature work.

Quick Facts

Points for touchdown: 6 points
League affiliation: National Football League (NFL)

Lore & Background

Set at small Logos College in West Texas, End Zone is narrated in first person by Gary Harkness, a blocking back on the football team during the school's first integrated year. The novel is divided into three sections. In the first, Gary meets Taft Robinson, Logos College's first Black football player, and Major Staley, the teacher of his modern warfare class. This class sparks Gary's developing obsession with nuclear warfare.

Gary begins dating Myna Corbett and an assistant coach commits suicide just as the crowning game of the season approaches. The second section is solely a play-by-play retelling of the Big Game itself. The third section surrounds the aftermath of the game as well as the impact of the plane-crash death of Logos College's founder. Gary, filled with ennui, plays a complex war game with Major Staley; the novel's metaphor of football as warfare is challenged in the line 'warfare is warfare.'

Taft Robinson admits that he has a morbid interest in the Holocaust which mirrors Gary's obsession. The novel ends with Gary being hospitalized for a mental breakdown, his future uncertain.

Reader's Guide

A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews argued that DeLillo 'seems to have at his natural command a kind of articulate mobility one cannot help but admire.' In The New York Times Book Review, Thomas R. Edwards deemed End Zone an improvement over Americana and said the writing 'is continuously energetic, shifty, fun to watch for its own sake.' Anya Taylor at The City University of New York argued the book would endure, especially praising Gary's desert meditation on the end zone.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of The New York Times stated that End Zone confirmed DeLillo as one of the best young writers of his time. Bill Beckett of The Harvard Crimson wrote that End Zone has perhaps the best extended account of a football game ever written, but argued that 'even isolated good satire can't hold together a disappointingly anticlimactic novel.' Chad Harbach lauded End Zone in 2004 as 'a wonderful and underrated novel.' Daniel Roberts highly praised the novel in a 2018 retrospective for The Paris Review, where he wrote, 'No novel nails the omnipresent violence of football better than End Zone.'

In 2007, however, the novel was listed by New York as one of DeLillo's works that is 'for fans only.' In 2011, Martin Amis listed End Zone among his favorite novels in DeLillo’s output. Jeff Somers conversely ranked it 10th out of 17 of the author’s books.