Don DeLillo, a novelist hailed as eerily prescient, isn’t an early adopter. He works on an Olympia typewriter, doesn’t use email or a cellphone, still reads the morning paper and watches the evening news.

His novels—which include “White Noise,” “Mao II” and “Underworld”—have addressed terrorism, celebrity and economic and environmental disasters years before they became the fodder of daily headlines.

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