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Thomas Pynchon

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   Thomas Pynchon in 1957, one of the few photographs of him ever to be
   published
   Enlarge
   Thomas Pynchon in 1957, one of the few photographs of him ever to be
   published

   Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American writer
   based in New York City. He is noted for his dense and complex works of
   fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the
   United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell
   University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s
   and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best
   known today: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow
   (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day
   (2006).

   Pynchon is regarded by many readers and critics as one of the finest
   contemporary authors. He is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the
   National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the
   Nobel Prize in Literature. Both his fiction and non-fiction writings
   encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including
   (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and mathematics.
   Pynchon is also known for his avoidance of personal publicity: very few
   photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his
   location and identity have been circulated since the 1960s.

Biography

   Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York,
   one of three children of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. (1907-1995) and
   Katherine Frances Bennett (1909-1996). His earliest American ancestor,
   William Pynchon, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the
   Winthrop Fleet in 1630, and thereafter a long line of Pynchon
   descendants found wealth and repute on American soil. Pynchon's family
   background and aspects of his ancestry have provided source material
   for his fictions, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related
   in "The Secret Integration" (1964) and Gravity's Rainbow.

Childhood and education

   Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School, where he wrote for the school
   newspaper and excelled in his studies. After graduating in 1953, he
   studied engineering physics at Cornell University, but left at the end
   of his second year to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, Pynchon returned
   to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. His first published story,
   "The Small Rain", appeared in the Cornell Writer in May 1959, and
   narrates an actual experience of a friend who had served in the army;
   subsequently, however, episodes and characters throughout Pynchon's
   fiction draw freely upon his own experiences in the navy.

   While at Cornell, Pynchon became a friend of Richard Fariña, and both
   briefly led what Pynchon has called a "micro-cult" around Oakley Hall's
   1958 novel Warlock. (He later reminisced about his college days in the
   introduction he wrote in 1983 for Fariña's novel Been Down So Long It
   Looks Like Up to Me, first published in 1966.) Pynchon also reportedly
   attended lectures given by Vladimir Nabokov, who then taught literature
   at Cornell. While Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon
   (although Nabokov's wife, Vera, who graded her husband's class papers,
   commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting, his later
   handwriting appears unexceptional), other teachers at Cornell, like the
   novelist James McConkey, recall him as being a gifted and exceptional
   student. Pynchon received his BA in June 1959.

Early career

   After leaving Cornell, Pynchon began to work on his first novel. From
   February 1960 to September 1962, he was employed as a technical writer
   at Boeing in Seattle, where he compiled safety articles for the Bomarc
   Service News (see Wisnicki 2000-1), a support newsletter for the BOMARC
   surface-to-air missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force. Pynchon's
   experiences at Boeing inspired his depictions of the " Yoyodyne"
   corporation in V. and The Crying of Lot 49, and both his background in
   physics and the technical journalism he undertook at Boeing provided
   much raw material for Gravity's Rainbow. When it was published in 1963,
   Pynchon's novel V. won a William Faulkner Foundation Award for best
   first novel of the year.

   After resigning from Boeing, Pynchon spent time in New York and Mexico
   before moving to California, where he was reportedly based for much of
   the 1960s and early 1970s, most notably in an apartment in Manhattan
   Beach (see Frost 2003). Pynchon during this period embraced the
   lifestyle and values of the hippie counterculture, which he would later
   make use of in his 1990 novel Vineland. (Gordon 1994). In 1964, his
   application to study mathematics as a graduate student at the
   University of California, Berkeley, was turned down (Royster 2005). In
   1966, he wrote a first-hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the
   Watts riots in Los Angeles. Entitled "A Journey Into the Mind of
   Watts," the article was published in the New York Times Magazine
   (Pynchon 1966).

   From the mid-1960s Pynchon has also regularly provided blurbs and
   introductions for a wide range of novels and non-fiction works. One of
   the first of these pieces was a brief review of Hall's Warlock which
   appeared, along with comments by seven other writers on "neglected
   books", as part of a feature entitled "A Gift of Books" in the December
   1965 issue of Holiday.
   Pynchon created the "muted post horn" as a symbol for the secret
   "Trystero" society in The Crying of Lot 49.
   Enlarge
   Pynchon created the "muted post horn" as a symbol for the secret
   "Trystero" society in The Crying of Lot 49.

   Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, is also set in
   California. It was published in 1966, and won the Richard and Hilda
   Rosenthal Foundation Award. Although more concise and linear in its
   structure than Pynchon's other novels, its labyrinthine plot features
   an ancient, underground mail service known as "The Tristero" or
   "Trystero," a parody of a Jacobean revenge drama entitled "The
   Courier's Tragedy," and a corporate conspiracy involving the bones of
   World War II American GIs being used as charcoal cigarette filters. It
   proposes a series of seemingly incredible interconnections between
   these and other similarly bizarre revelations that confront the novel's
   protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Like V, the novel contains a wealth of
   references to science and technology and to obscure historical events,
   and both books dwell upon the detritus of American society and culture.
   The Crying of Lot 49 also continues Pynchon's habit of composing
   parodic song lyrics and punning names, and referencing aspects of
   popular culture within his prose narrative. In particular, it
   incorporates several allusions to Nabokov's Lolita.

   In 1968, Pynchon was one of 447 signatories to the "Writers and Editors
   War Tax Protest." Full-page advertisements in The New York Post and The
   New York Review of Books listed the names of those who had pledged not
   to pay "the proposed 10% income tax surcharge or any war-designated tax
   increase," and stated their belief "that American involvement in
   Vietnam is morally wrong" (New York Review of Books 1968:9).

Gravity's Rainbow and Pynchon's rise to prominence

   Pynchon's most celebrated novel is his third, Gravity's Rainbow,
   published in 1973. An intricate and allusive fiction which combines and
   elaborates on many of the themes of his earlier work, including
   preterition, paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity,
   and entropy, the novel has spawned a wealth of commentary and critical
   material, including two reader's guides (Fowler 1980; Weisenburger
   1988), books and scholarly articles, on-line concordances and
   discussions, and art works, and is regarded as one of the archetypal
   texts of American literary postmodernism. The major portion of
   Gravity's Rainbow takes place in London and Europe in the final months
   of the Second World War and the weeks immediately following VE Day, and
   is narrated for the most part from within the historical moment in
   which it is set. In this way, Pynchon's text enacts a type of dramatic
   irony whereby neither the characters nor the various narrative voices
   are aware of specific historical circumstances, such as the Holocaust,
   which are, however, very much to the forefront of the reader's
   understanding of this time in history. Such an approach generates
   dynamic tension and moments of acute self-consciousness, as both reader
   and author seem drawn ever deeper into the " plot", in various senses
   of that term. Encyclopedic in scope, the novel also displays enormous
   erudition in its treatment of an array of material drawn from the
   fields of psychology, chemistry, mathematics, history, religion, music,
   literature and film. Perhaps appropriately for a book so suffused with
   engineering knowledge, Pynchon reportedly wrote the first draft of
   Gravity's Rainbow in longhand on engineer's graph paper, in California
   and Mexico City.

   Gravity's Rainbow was a joint winner of the 1974 National Book Award
   for Fiction, along with Isaac Bashevis Singer's A Crown of Feathers and
   Other Stories. In the same year, the fiction jury unanimously
   recommended Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize; however, the
   Pulitzer board vetoed the jury's recommendation, describing the novel
   as "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in parts "obscene", and
   no prize was awarded (Kihss 1974). In 1975, Pynchon declined the
   William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Post-Gravity's Rainbow

   A collection of Pynchon's early short stories, entitled Slow Learner,
   was published in 1984, with a lengthy autobiographical introduction. In
   October of the same year, an article entitled "Is It O.K. to Be a
   Luddite?" was published in the New York Times Book Review. In April
   1988, Pynchon contributed an extensive review of Gabriel García
   Marquéz's novel, Love in the Time of Cholera, to the New York Times,
   under the title "The Heart's Eternal Vow". Another article, entitled
   "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee", was published in June 1993 in the New York
   Times Book Review, as one in a series of articles in which various
   writers reflected on each of the Seven Deadly Sins. Pynchon's subject
   was " Sloth".

   Pynchon's fourth novel, Vineland, was published in 1990, and was
   regarded as a disappointment by the majority of reviewers and critics.
   The novel is set in California in the 1980s and 1960s, and describes
   the relationship between an FBI COINTELPRO agent and a female radical
   filmmaker. Its strong socio-political undercurrents detail the constant
   battle between authoritarianism and communalism, and the nexus between
   resistance and complicity, but with a typically Pynchonian sense of
   humor.

   In 1988, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and, since the early 1990s
   at least, many observers have mentioned Pynchon as a Nobel Prize
   contender (see, for example, Grimes 1993; CNN Book News 1999; Ervin
   2000). Renowned American literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as
   one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Don
   DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy.

   Pynchon's fifth novel is Mason & Dixon, a work which had been in the
   pipeline since 1978 at least (Roeder 1978; see also Ulin 1997).
   Published in 1997, the meticulously-researched novel is a sprawling
   postmodernist saga recounting the lives and careers of the English
   astronomer, Charles Mason, and his partner, the surveyor Jeremiah
   Dixon, and the birth of the American Republic. While it received some
   negative reviews, the great majority of commentators acknowledged it as
   a welcome return to form, and some, including Bloom, have called it
   Pynchon's greatest work to date.

Against the Day

   A variety of rumors pertaining to the subject matter of Pynchon's next
   book have circulated over a number of years. Most specific of these
   were comments made by the former German minister of culture, Michael
   Naumann, who stated that he assisted Pynchon in his research about "a
   Russian mathematician [who] studied for David Hilbert in Göttingen",
   and that the new novel would trace the life and loves of Sofia
   Kovalevskaya.

   In July 2006, a new untitled novel by Pynchon was announced along with
   a synopsis written by Pynchon himself, which appeared on Amazon.com,
   stating that the novel's action takes place between the 1893 Chicago
   World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I. "With a
   worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead," Pynchon writes in
   his Book Description, "it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed,
   false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high
   places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be
   inferred." He promises cameos by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho
   Marx, as well as "stupid songs" and "strange sexual practices".
   Subsequently, the title of the new book was reported as Against the Day
   and a Penguin spokesperson confirmed that the synopsis was Pynchon's
   (Patterson 2006b; Italie 2006).

   Against the Day was released November 21, 2006 and is 1,085 pages long
   in the first edition hardcover. The book was given almost no promotion
   by Penguin and professional book reviewers were given little time in
   advance to review the book, presumably in accord with Pynchon's wishes.
   An edited version of Pynchon's synopsis was used as the jacket flap
   copy and Kovalevskaya does appear, although as only one of over a
   hundred characters.

   There has been no general consensus among professional book reviewers,
   although many agree that it is in turns brilliant and exhausting. A
   Pynchon wiki was launched by fans the same day as Against the Day to
   help readers keep track of the numerous characters, events and themes.

Themes and influence

   Along with its emphasis on loftier themes such as racism, imperialism
   and religion, and its cognizance and appropriation of many elements of
   traditional high culture and literary form, Pynchon's work also
   demonstrates a strong affinity with the practitioners and artifacts of
   low culture, including comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular
   films, television programs, cookery, urban myths, conspiracy theories,
   and folk art. This blurring of the conventional boundary between "High"
   and "low" culture, sometimes interpreted as a " deconstruction", is
   seen as one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism.

   In particular, Pynchon has revealed himself in his fiction and
   non-fiction as an aficionado of popular music. Song lyrics and mock
   musical numbers appear in each of his novels, and, in his
   autobiographical introduction to the Slow Learner collection of early
   stories, he reveals a fondness for both jazz and rock and roll. The
   character McClintic Sphere in V. is a fictional composite of master
   jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker and Thelonious
   Monk. In The Crying of Lot 49, the lead singer of "The Paranoids"
   sports "a Beatle haircut" and sings with an English accent. In the
   closing pages of Gravity's Rainbow, there is an apocryphal report that
   Tyrone Slothrop, the novel's protagonist, played kazoo and harmonica as
   a guest musician on a record released by The Fool in the 1960s (having
   magically recovered the latter instrument, his " harp", in a German
   stream in 1945, after losing it down the toilet in 1939 at the Roseland
   Ballroom in Roxbury, Boston, to the strains of the jazz standard
   'Cherokee', upon which tune Charlie Parker was simultaneously inventing
   bebop in New York, as Pynchon describes). In Vineland, both Zoyd
   Wheeler and Isaiah Two Four are also musicians: Zoyd played keyboards
   in a '60s surf band called "The Corvairs", while Isaiah played in a
   punk band called "Billy Barf and the Vomitones". In Mason & Dixon, one
   of the characters plays on the "Clavier" the varsity drinking song
   which will later become " The Star-Spangled Banner".

   In his Slow Learner introduction, Pynchon acknowledges a debt to the
   anarchic bandleader Spike Jones, and in 1994, he penned a 3000-word set
   of liner notes for the album Spiked!, a collection of Jones's
   recordings released on the short-lived BMG Catalyst label. Pynchon also
   wrote the liner notes for Nobody's Cool, the second album of indie rock
   band Lotion, in which he states that "rock and roll remains one of the
   last honorable callings, and a working band is a miracle of everyday
   life. Which is basically what these guys do." He is also known to be a
   fan of Roky Erickson.

   In terms of literary influences and affinity, an eclectic catalogue of
   Pynchonian precursors has been proposed by readers and critics. Beside
   overt references in the novels to writers as disparate as Henry Adams,
   Giorgio de Chirico, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria
   Rilke, Jorge Luis Borges, Ishmael Reed, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Patrick
   O'Brian, and Umberto Eco, and to an eclectic mix of iconic religious
   and philosophical sources, credible comparisons with works by Rabelais,
   Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne,
   Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, William
   Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, Patrick White, and Toni Morrison have also
   been made. Some commentators have detected similarities with those
   writers in the Modernist tradition who wrote extremely long novels
   dealing with large metaphysical or political issues. Examples of such
   works might include Ulysses by James Joyce, A Passage to India by E.M.
   Forster, The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis, The Man Without Qualities by
   Robert Musil, or The Castle by Franz Kafka. In his 'Introduction' to
   Slow Learner, Pynchon explicitly acknowledges his debt to Beat
   Generation writers, and expresses his admiration for Jack Kerouac's On
   the Road in particular; he also reveals his familiarity with literary
   works by T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow,
   Herbert Gold, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, and non-fiction works by
   Helen Waddell, Norbert Wiener and Isaac Asimov. Other contemporary
   American authors whose fiction is often categorised alongside Pynchon's
   include John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Donald Barthelme,
   John Barth, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, and Joseph McElroy. Younger
   contemporary writers who have been touted as heirs apparent to Pynchon
   include David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann, Richard Powers, David
   Mitchell, Neal Stephenson, Dave Eggers, Christopher Wunderlee, and
   Tommaso Pincio whose pseudonym is an Italian rendering of Pynchon's
   name.

   Investigations and digressions into the realms of human sexuality,
   psychology, sociology, mathematics, science, and technology recur
   throughout Pynchon's works. One of his earliest short stories,
   "Low-lands" (1960), features a meditation on Heisenberg's uncertainty
   principle as a metaphor for telling stories about one's own
   experiences. His next published work, "Entropy" (1960), introduced the
   concept which was to become synonymous with Pynchon's name (though
   Pynchon later admitted the "shallowness of [his] understanding" of the
   subject, and noted that choosing an abstract concept first and trying
   to construct a narrative around it was "a lousy way to go about writing
   a story"). Another early story, "Under the Rose" (1961), includes
   amongst its cast of characters a cyborg set anachronistically in
   Victorian-era Egypt (a type of writing now called steampunk). This
   story, significantly reworked by Pynchon, appears as Chapter 3 of V.
   "The Secret Integration" (1964), Pynchon's last published short story,
   is a sensitively-handled coming-of-age tale in which a group of young
   boys face the consequences of the American policy of racial
   integration. At one point in the story, the boys attempt to understand
   the new policy by way of the mathematical operation, the only sense of
   the word with which they are familiar.

   The Crying of Lot 49 also alludes to entropy and communication theory,
   and contains scenes and descriptions which parody or appropriate
   calculus, Zeno's paradoxes, and the thought experiment known as
   Maxwell's demon. At the same time, the novel also investigates
   homosexuality, celibacy and both medically-sanctioned and illicit
   psychedelic drug use. Gravity's Rainbow describes many varieties of
   sexual fetishism (including sado-masochism, coprophilia and a
   borderline case of tentacle rape), and features numerous episodes of
   drug use, most notably marijuana but also cocaine, naturally occurring
   hallucinogens, and the mushroom Amanita muscaria. Gravity's Rainbow
   also derives much from Pynchon's background in mathematics: at one
   point, the geometry of garter belts is compared with that of cathedral
   spires, both described as mathematical singularities. His most recent
   novel, Mason & Dixon, explores the scientific, theological, and
   sociocultural foundations of the Age of Reason whilst also depicting
   the relationships between actual historical figures and fictional
   characters in intricate detail and, like Gravity's Rainbow, is an
   archetypal example of the genre of historiographical metafiction.

   Pynchon's work has been cited as an influence and inspiration by many
   writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers, including T. Coraghessan
   Boyle, Don DeLillo, Paul Di Filippo, William Gibson, Elfriede Jelinek,
   Rick Moody, Arturo Perez-Reverte, Richard Powers, Salman Rushdie, Neal
   Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Laurie Anderson, the Definitive Jux hip-hop
   producer/CEO/emcee El-P, Max P. Häring, Zak Smith, David Cronenberg,
   and Adam Rapp. Thanks to his influence on Gibson and Stephenson in
   particular, Pynchon became one of the progenitors of cyberpunk fiction.
   Though the term "cyberpunk" did not become prevalent until the early
   1980s, many readers retroactively include Gravity's Rainbow in the
   genre, along with other works—e.g., Samuel R. Delany's Nova and many
   works of Philip K. Dick—which seem, after the fact, to anticipate
   cyberpunk styles and themes. The encyclopedic nature of Pynchon's
   novels also led to some attempts to link his work with the short-lived
   hypertext fiction movement of the 1990s (Page 2002; Krämer 2005).

   Gravity's Rainbow and the more recent Mason & Dixon both feature wildly
   eccentric characters, episodes of frenzied action and frequent
   digressions on topics which are seemingly tangential to the central
   narrative. These characteristics, combined with the novels' imposing
   lengths, have led critic James Wood to classify Pynchon's work as
   hysterical realism. Other writers whose work has been labelled as
   hysterical realism include Rushdie, Stephenson, Wunderlee and Zadie
   Smith.

Works

     * V. (1963), winner of William Faulkner Foundation Award
     * The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), winner of Richard and Hilda Rosenthal
       Foundation Award
     * Gravity's Rainbow (1973), 1974 National Book Award for fiction,
       judges' unanimous selection for Pulitzer Prize overruled by
       advisory board, awarded William Dean Howells Medal of the American
       Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975 (award declined)
     * Slow Learner (1984), collection of early short stories
     * Vineland (1990)
     * Mason & Dixon (1997)
     * Against the Day (21 November, 2006)

   As well as fictional works, Pynchon has written essays, introductions,
   and reviews addressing subjects as diverse as missile security, the
   Watts Riots, Luddism and the work of Donald Barthelme. Some of his
   non-fiction pieces have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and
   The New York Review of Books, and he has contributed blurbs for books
   and records. His 1984 Introduction to the Slow Learner collection of
   early stories is significant for its autobiographical candour. He has
   written introductions to at least two books, including the 1992
   collection of Donald Barthelme's stories, The Teachings of Don B. and,
   more recently, the Penguin Centenary Edition of George Orwell's novel
   Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 2003.
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