Don DeLillo still bangs out his novels on an old Olympia typewriter. He barely watches television, except for sports and the occasional documentary. He doesn't use email.

He could scarcely be more insulated from mainstream American culture. And yet Mr. DeLillo has written with eerie foresight about many of the issues that define 21st-century America, from international terrorism, which he wrote about in his 1991 novel "Mao II," to globalization, environmental disasters, the allure of technology and the psychology...