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Thomas Pynchon

January 01, 1970

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. (/ˈpɪntʃɒn/ PIN-chon,[1][2] commonly /ˈpɪntʃən/ PIN-chən;[3] born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.[4]

Thomas Pynchon
Pynchon in 1953 yearbook image
BornThomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.
(1937-05-08) May 8, 1937 (age 86)
Glen Cove, New York, U.S.
EducationCornell University (BA)
Periodc. 1959–present
Notable works
Spouse
Melanie Jackson
​
(m. 1990)​
Children1
Signature

Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served 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: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as the 1980s; the novel, Mason & Dixon, was published in 1997 to critical acclaim. His 2009 novel Inherent Vice was adapted into a feature film by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive from the media; few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. Pynchon's most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, was published on September 17, 2013.

Early life edit

 
Pynchon, age 16, in his high school senior portrait

Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York,[5] one of three children of engineer and politician Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Sr. (1907–1995) and Katherine Frances Bennett (1909–1996), a nurse. During his childhood, Pynchon alternately attended Episcopal services with his father and Roman Catholic services with his mother.[6]

Education and military career edit

A "voracious reader and precocious writer", Pynchon is believed to have skipped two grades before high school.[6] Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School in Oyster Bay, where he was awarded "student of the year" and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper. These juvenilia incorporated some of the literary motifs and recurring subject matter he would use throughout his career: oddball names, sophomoric humor, illicit drug use, and paranoia.[7][8][9][10]

Thomas Pynchon
 
Pynchon c. 1955
Allegiance  United States
Branch  United States Navy
Service years1955–1957
Service number4881936[11]

Pynchon graduated from high school in 1953 at the age of 16. That fall, he went to Cornell University to study engineering physics. At the end of his sophomore year, he enlisted to serve in the U.S. Navy. He attended boot camp at United States Naval Training Center Bainbridge, Maryland, then received training to be an electrician at a base in Norfolk, Virginia.[12] In 1956, he was aboard the destroyer USS Hank in the Mediterranean during the Suez Crisis.[13] According to recollections from his Navy friends, Pynchon said at the time that he did not intend to complete his college education.[6]

 
During his time as a US Navy sailor, Pynchon is believed to have served aboard the USS Hank during the Suez Crisis.

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 March 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.[14] His short story, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna", was published in the Spring 1959 issue of Epoch.[15]

While at Cornell, Pynchon started his friendships with Richard Fariña, Kirkpatrick Sale, and David Shetzline.[16] Pynchon would go on to dedicate Gravity's Rainbow to Fariña, and to serve as his best man and his pallbearer. In his introduction to Fariña's novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, Pynchon recalls that "we also succeeded in getting on the same literary wavelength. We showed up once at a party, not a masquerade party, in disguise—he as Hemingway, I as Scott Fitzgerald, each of us aware that the other had been through a phase of enthusiasm for his respective author ... Also in '59 we simultaneously picked up on what I still think is among the finest American novels, Oakley Hall's Warlock. We set about getting others to read it too, and for a while we had a micro-cult going. Soon a number of us were talking in Warlock dialogue, a kind of thoughtful, stylized, Victorian-Wild West diction."[17] Richard Fariña also wrote an instrumental "V" which is on the album "Celebrations For A Grey Day".[18] He reportedly attended lectures given by Vladimir Nabokov, who then taught literature at Cornell. Although Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon, Nabokov's wife Véra, who graded her husband's class papers, commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting as a mixture of printed and cursive letters, "half printing, half script."[19][20] In 1958, Pynchon and Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical, Minstrel Island, which portrayed a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world.[21] Pynchon received his B.A. with distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in June 1959.

Career edit

Early career edit

V. edit

Main article: V.
 
V. (1963)

After leaving Cornell, Pynchon began to work on his first novel, V. 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, a support newsletter for the BOMARC surface-to-air missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force.[22] 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. V. won the William Faulkner Foundation Award For Notable First Novel and was a finalist for the National Book Award.[23]

George Plimpton gave the book a positive review in The New York Times. He described it as a picaresque novel, in which "The author can tell his favorite jokes, throw in a song, indulge in a fantasy, include his own verse, display an intimate knowledge of such disparate subjects as physics, astronomy, art, jazz, how a nose-job is done, the wildlife in the New York sewage system. These indeed are some of the topics which constitute a recent and remarkable example of the genre: a brilliant and turbulent first novel published this month by a young Cornell graduate, Thomas Pynchon." Plimpton called Pynchon "a writer of staggering promise."[24]

After resigning from Boeing, Pynchon spent some 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,[25] as he was composing what would become Gravity's Rainbow.

A negative aspect that Pynchon retrospectively found in the hippie cultural and literary movement, both in the form of the Beats of the 1950s and the resurgence form of the 1960s, was that it "placed too much emphasis on youth, including the eternal variety."[14]

In 1964, his application to study mathematics as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley was turned down.[26] In 1966, Pynchon wrote a first-hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, titled "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts", and published in The New York Times Magazine.[27]

From the mid-1960s Pynchon has also regularly provided blurbs and introductions for a wide range of novels and non-fiction works. He contributed an appreciation of Oakley Hall's Warlock in a feature called "A Gift of Books" in the December 1965 issue of Holiday. Pynchon wrote that Hall "has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity ... It is this deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock, I think, one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall’s to remind us how far that piece of paper, still fluttering brightly behind us, has to fall."[28]

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".[29] Time's review of V. concluded: "V. sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man. What does it mean? Who, finally, is V.? Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind, but this is one. Who, indeed?"[30].

The Crying of Lot 49 edit

Main article: The Crying of Lot 49
 
Pynchon created the "muted post horn" as a symbol for the secret "Trystero" society in The Crying of Lot 49.

In an April 1964 letter to his agent, Candida Donadio, Pynchon wrote that he was facing a creative crisis, with four novels in progress, announcing: "If they come out on paper anything like they are inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium."[31]

In the mid-1960s, Pynchon lived at 217 33rd St. in Manhattan Beach, California, in a small downstairs apartment.[32]

In December 1965, Pynchon politely turned down an invitation from Stanley Edgar Hyman to teach literature at Bennington College, writing that he had resolved, two or three years earlier, to write three novels at once. Pynchon described the decision as "a moment of temporary insanity", but noted that he was "too stubborn to let any of them go, let alone all of them."[33]

Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, was published a few months later in 1966. Whether it was one of the three or four novels Pynchon had in progress is not known, but in a 1965 letter to Donadio, Pynchon had written that he was in the middle of writing a "potboiler". When the book grew to 155 pages, he called it, "a short story, but with gland trouble", and hoped that Donadio could "unload it on some poor sucker."[31]

The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award shortly after publication.[34][35] 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 called 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 events 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.The Crying of Lot 49 also continues Pynchon's habits of writing satiric song lyrics and referencing popular culture. An example of both can be seen in allusion to the narrator of Nabokov's Lolita in the lyric of a love lament sung by a member of "The Paranoids", an American teenage band who deliberately sing their songs with British accents (p. 17). Despite Pynchon's alleged dislike, Lot 49 received positive reviews; Harold Bloom named it one of Pynchon's "canonical works", along with Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon. It was included on Time's list of the 100 best English-language novels published since the magazine's founding in 1923. Richard Lacayao wrote, "With its slapstick paranoia and heartbreaking metaphysical soliloquies, Lot 49 takes place in the tragicomic universe that is instantly recognizable as Pynchon-land. Is it also a mystery novel? Absolutely, so long as you recognize the mystery here is the one at the heart of everything."[36]

Gravity's Rainbow edit

Main article: Gravity's Rainbow
 
Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

Pynchon's most famous novel is his third, Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973. An intricate and allusive fiction that combines and elaborates on many of the themes of his earlier work, including preterition, paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity, and entropy,[37][38] there is a wealth of commentary and critical material, including reader's guides,[39][40] books and scholarly articles, online concordances and discussions, and art works. Its artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce's Ulysses.[41] Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post-WW2 novel,[42] and it has similarly been described as "literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices".[43] Richard Locke, reviewing it in The New York Times, wrote that "Gravity's Rainbow is longer, darker and more difficult than his first two books; in fact it is the longest, most difficult and most ambitious novel to appear in these pages since Nabokov's Ada four years ago; its technical and verbal resources bring to mind Melville and Faulkner."[44]

The major portion of Gravity's Rainbow takes place in Europe in the final months of World War II 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 and, except as hints, premonitions and mythography, the complicity between Western corporate interests and the Nazi war machine, which figure prominently in readers' apprehensions of the novel's historical context. For example, at war's end the narrator observes: "There are rumors of a War Crimes Tribunal under way in Nürnberg. No one Slothrop has listened to is clear who's trying whom for what ..." (p. 681). 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:

Pynchon presents us with a Disney-meets-Bosch panorama of European politics, American entropy, industrial history, and libidinal panic which leaves a chaotic whirl of fractal patterns in the reader's mind.[45]

If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.

–Gravity's Rainbow

The novel invokes anti-authority sentiments, often through violations of narrative conventions and integrity. For example, as the protagonist, Tyrone Slothrop, considers the fact that his own family "made its money killing trees", he apostrophizes his apology and plea for advice to the coppice within which he has momentarily taken refuge. In an overt incitement to eco-activism, Pynchon's narrative agency then has it that "a medium-sized pine nearby nods its top and suggests, 'Next time you come across a logging operation out here, find one of their tractors that isn't being guarded, and take its oil filter with you. That's what you can do.'" (p. 553)

Encyclopedic in scope and often self-conscious in style, the novel displays erudition in its treatment of an array of material drawn from the fields of psychology, chemistry, mathematics, history, religion, music, literature, human sexuality, and film. Pynchon wrote the first draft of Gravity's Rainbow in "neat, tiny script on engineer's quadrille paper".[40] Pynchon worked on the novel throughout the 1960s and early 1970s while he was living in California and Mexico City.

Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (split award).[4] That same year, the Pulitzer Prize For Fiction panel unanimously recommended Gravity's Rainbow for the award, but the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury's recommendation, describing the novel as "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in parts "obscene".[34] (No Pulitzer Prize For Fiction was awarded that year and finalists were not recognized before 1980.)[46] In 1975, Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal.[47] Along with Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow was included on Time's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published since the magazine's founding, with Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayao commenting on its "fantastic multitude of meditations upon the human need to build systems of intellectual order even as we use the same powers of intellect to hasten our destruction. (Did we mention that this is also a comedy, more or less?) Among American writers of the second half of the 20th century, Pynchon is the indisputed candidate for lasting literary greatness. This book is why."[48]

His earliest American ancestor, William Pynchon, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, then became the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1636, and thereafter a long line of Pynchon descendants found wealth and repute on American soil. Aspects of Pynchon's ancestry and family background have partially inspired his fiction writing, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in the short story "The Secret Integration" (1964) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973).[citation needed]

Later career edit

 
Slow Learner (1984)

A collection of Pynchon's early short stories, Slow Learner, was published in 1984, with a lengthy autobiographical introduction. In October of the same year, an article titled "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" was published in The New York Times Book Review.[49] In April 1988, Pynchon reviewed Gabriel García Márquez's Love in the Time of Cholera in The New York Times, calling it "a shining and heartbreaking book."[50] Another article, titled "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".[51] In 1989, Pynchon was one of many authors who signed a letter of solidarity with Salman Rushdie after Rushdie was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah for his novel The Satanic Verses. Pynchon wrote: "I pray that tolerance and respect for life prevail. I keep thinking of you."[52]

Vineland edit

Main article: Vineland

Pynchon's fourth novel, Vineland, was published in 1990 and disappointed some fans and critics. It did, however, receive a positive review from Salman Rushdie, who called it "free-flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with ... the entropy's still flowing, but there is something new to report, some faint possibility of redemption, some fleeting hints of happiness and grace. Thomas Pynchon, like Paul Simon's girl in New York City, who calls herself the Human Trampoline, is bouncing into Graceland."[53] 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.[54]

In 1988, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and, since the early 1990s at least, he has been frequently cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[55][56][57] Pynchon provided a blurb for Don DeLillo's novel Mao II, about a reclusive novelist and partly inspired by the fatwa on Salman Rushdie: "This novel's a beauty. DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey, beyond all the official versions of our daily history, behind all the easy assumptions about who we're supposed to be, with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing."[58]

Mason & Dixon edit

Main article: Mason & Dixon
 
 
Mason & Dixon (1997) is a fictionalized account of the lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the historical surveyors of the Mason–Dixon line.

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, the drawers of the Mason–Dixon line, during the birth of the American Republic. The dust jacket notes that it features appearances from George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Johnson and a talking dog. Some commentators acknowledged it as a welcome return to form; T. C. Boyle called it "the old Pynchon, the true Pynchon, the best Pynchon of all" and "a book of heart and fire and genius."[59] Michiko Kakutani called Mason and Dixon Pynchon's most human characters, writing that they "become fully fleshed-out people, their feelings, hopes and yearnings made as palpably real as their outrageously comic high jinks."[60] The American critic Harold Bloom hailed the novel as Pynchon's "masterpiece to date".[61] Bloom named Pynchon as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo.[62][63] For The Independent feature Book Of A Lifetime, Marek Kohn chose Mason & Dixon "precisely because my own teens were long gone by the time it came out: it showed me that being exhilarated by prose is not just an effect of youthful overexcitement."[64]

Against the Day edit

Main article: Against the Day

A variety of rumors pertaining to the subject matter of Against the Day circulated for 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.[65]

In July 2006, a new, untitled novel by Pynchon was announced along with a description written by Pynchon himself: "Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the times of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, 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 promised 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 to be Against the Day and a Penguin spokesperson confirmed that the synopsis was Pynchon's.[66][67]

Against the Day was released on 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. 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.

Composed in part of a series of interwoven pastiches of popular fiction genres from the era in which it is set, the novel inspired mixed reactions from critics and reviewers. One reviewer remarked, "It is brilliant, but it is exhaustingly brilliant."[68] Other reviewers described Against the Day as "lengthy and rambling"[69] and "a baggy monster of a book",[70] while negative appraisals condemned the novel for its "silliness"[71] or characterized its action as "fairly pointless" and remained unimpressed by its "grab bag of themes".[72]

In 2006, Pynchon wrote a letter defending Ian McEwan against charges of plagiarism in his novel Atonement: "Oddly enough, those of us who write historical fiction do feel some obligation to accuracy. It is that Ruskin business about 'a capacity of responsiveness to the claims of fact, but unoppressed by them.' Unless we were actually there, we must turn to people who were, or to letters, contemporary reporting, the encyclopedia, the Internet, until, with luck, at some point, we can begin to make a few things of our own up. To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act-- it is simply what we do."[73]

Inherent Vice edit

Main articles: Inherent Vice and Inherent Vice (film)

Inherent Vice was published in August 2009.

A synopsis and brief extract from the novel, along with the novel's title, Inherent Vice, and dust jacket image, were printed in Penguin Press' Summer 2009 catalogue. The book was advertised by the publisher as "part-noir, part-psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a cannabis haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog."

A promotional video for the novel was released by Penguin Books on August 4, 2009, with the character voiceover narrated by Pynchon himself.[74]

A 2014 film adaptation of the same name was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.

Bleeding Edge edit

Main article: Bleeding Edge (novel)

Bleeding Edge takes place in Manhattan's Silicon Alley during "the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events of September 11." The novel was published on September 17, 2013,[75] to positive reviews.

Style edit

Poet L. E. Sissman wrote in The New Yorker: "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drugged and drunken orgy."[76]

Pynchon often engages in parodies or pastiches of other styles; Mason & Dixon is written in the style of the eighteenth-century, when it takes place. Anthony Lane, reviewing the novel in The New Yorker, writes that "It sounds and, more important, looks like a period novel; it comes bedecked with archaic spellings, complex punctuation, words like 'Nebulosity,' 'Fescue,' 'pinguid,' and 'G-d.' ... This is hard to fault as pastiche, and yet it moves beyond pastiche, with none of the cramped self-amusement that usually attends the genre. What is more, it bears the signature—wholly unmistakable but written, as it were, in invisible ink—of Pynchon himself." Pynchon includes deliberate anachronisms: Lane notes that "the shipboard scenes include an honorary mention of a sailor named Pat O'Brian, 'the best Yarn-Spinner in all the fleets,' and the current president might allow himself a small smile at the advice on Indian hemp which is offered to Cherrycoke as he prepares to set sail: 'If you must use the latter, do not inhale. Keep your memory working, young man!' Whether Thomas Pynchon himself would heed this counsel is hard to decide. His memory seems, as ever, not only to have gorged itself on facts and figures but to have kept the whole lot down ... On the other hand, this book could have been conceived in the fumes of inhalation: it has a dreamed quality, an eagerness to be haunted ... Pynchon is furiously clever, but more important and, I suspect, more enduring, is his anatomy of melancholy, his conjuring of a doleful burlesque ... Good luck, and G-dspeed."[77] Pynchon's prose, with its wide range of styles and subjects, is commonly classified as postmodern.[78][79][80]

Pynchon makes frequent allusions to other authors; in the introduction to Slow Learner, a collection of his early short stories, he acknowledges his debts to the modernists, especially T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and to the Beats, particularly Jack Kerouac's On the Road. He also writes of the influence of jazz and rock and roll, and satiric song lyrics and mock musical numbers are a trademark of his fiction. In his essay "Smoking Dope With Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir", Andrew Gordon writes: "Kerouac's heroes were filled with romantic angst and an unfulfilled yearning to burn like roman candles, whereas Pynchon's were clowns, schlemiels and human yo-yos, bouncing between farce and paranoia. Kerouac was of the cool fifties; he wrote jazz fiction. But Pynchon was of the apocalyptic sixties; he wrote rock and roll."[81]

Themes edit

In her review of Mason & Dixon, Michiko Kakutani writes: "The Great Big Theme in all of Thomas Pynchon's novels, from V. (1963) through Gravity's Rainbow (1973) and Vineland (1990) has been: Is the world dominated by conspiracy or chaos? Are there patterns, secret codes, hidden agendas -- in short, a hidden design -- to the bubble and turmoil of human existence, or is it all a product of chance? Are the paranoiacs onto something, or do the nihilists have the key to it all?"[60]

Pynchon's work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological ideas exhaustively, though in quirky and approachable ways. His writings demonstrate 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 has been seen as one of the defining characteristics of his writing.[82][83]

Pynchon makes frequent musical allusions. McClintic Sphere in V. is a composite of 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 that will later become "The Star-Spangled Banner"; while in another episode a character remarks tangentially "Sometimes, it's hard to be a woman." He also alludes to classical music; in V., a character sings an aria from Mozart's Don Giovanni. In Lot 49 Oedipa listens to "the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble's variorum recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist."

In his introduction to Slow Learner, Pynchon acknowledges a debt to the anarchic bandleader Spike Jones, and in 1994, he penned a 3,000-word set of liner notes for the album Spiked!, a collection of Jones's recordings released on the short-lived BMG Catalyst label.[84] 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 known to be a fan of Roky Erickson.[85]

Investigations and digressions into 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 based on it was "a lousy way to go about writing a story"). Another early story, "Under the Rose" (1961), includes among its cast of characters a cyborg set anachronistically in Victorian-era Egypt (a precursor of what is 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 erotica), and features numerous episodes of drug use, most notably cannabis 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. Mason & Dixon explores the scientific, theological, and socio-cultural foundations of the Age of Reason while 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 historiographic metafiction.

Influence edit

Precursors edit

Pynchon's novels refer overtly to writers as disparate as Henry Adams (in V., p. 62), Jorge Luis Borges (in Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 264), Deleuze and Guattari (in Vineland, p. 97),[86] Emily Dickinson (in Gravity’s Rainbow, pp. 27–8), Umberto Eco (in Mason & Dixon, p. 559),[87] Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Vineland, p. 369), "Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, di Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros" (in V., p. 307), William March[citation needed], Vladimir Nabokov (in The Crying of Lot 49, p. 120), Patrick O'Brian (in Mason & Dixon, p. 54), Ishmael Reed (in Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 558), Rainer Maria Rilke (in Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 97 f) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (in V., p. 278 f), and to a heady mixture of iconic religious and philosophical sources.[88][89][90][91]

Critics have made comparisons of Pynchon's writing with works by Rabelais,[92][93] Cervantes,[92][94] Laurence Sterne,[95][96] Edgar Allan Poe,[97][98] Nathaniel Hawthorne,[99][100] Herman Melville,[92][101] Charles Dickens,[102][103] Joseph Conrad,[104][105] Thomas Mann,[106][107] William S. Burroughs,[108][109] Ralph Ellison,[109][110] Patrick White,[111][112] and Toni Morrison.[90][113]

Pynchon's work also has similarities with modernist writers who wrote long novels dealing with large metaphysical or political issues, such as James Joyce's Ulysses, E. M. Forster's A Passage to India, Wyndham Lewis's The Apes of God, Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities and John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy.[38][114][115][116][117] He also outlines the influence on his own early fiction of literary works by Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Herbert Gold, Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Buchan and Graham Greene, and non-fiction works by Helen Waddell, Norbert Wiener and Isaac Asimov.[14]

Legacy edit

Pynchon's work has been cited as an influence and inspiration by many writers, among them Elfriede Jelinek (who translated Gravity's Rainbow into German), David Foster Wallace, William T. Vollmann, Richard Powers, Steve Erickson, David Mitchell, Neal Stephenson, Dave Eggers, William Gibson, T. C. Boyle, Salman Rushdie, Alan Moore, and Tommaso Pincio (whose pseudonym is an Italian rendering of Pynchon's name).[118]

Thanks to his influence on Gibson and Stephenson in particular, Pynchon became one of the progenitors of cyberpunk fiction; a 1987 essay in Spin magazine by Timothy Leary explicitly named Gravity's Rainbow as the "Old Testament" of cyberpunk, with Gibson's Neuromancer and its sequels as the "New Testament". Though the term "cyberpunk" did not become prevalent until the early 1980s, since Leary's article many readers have retroactively included Gravity's Rainbow in the genre, along with other works—Samuel R. Delany's Dhalgren and many works of Philip K. Dick—which seem, in hindsight, to anticipate cyberpunk styles and themes. The encyclopedic nature of Pynchon's novels also led to some attempts to link his work with the hypertext fiction movement of the 1990s.[119] Ian Rankin, author of the Inspector Rebus mystery novels, called encountering Pynchon in college "a revelation": "Pynchon seemed to fit the model I was learning of literature as an extended code or grail quest. Moreover, he was like a drug: as you worked out one layer of meaning, you quickly wanted to move to the next. He wrote action novels about spies and soldiers which also happened to be detective stories and bawdy romps. His books were picaresquely post-modern and his humour was Marxian (tendance: Groucho). On page six of The Crying of Lot 49, the name Quackenbush appears, and you know you are in safely comedic hands."[120]

The main-belt asteroid 152319 is named after Pynchon.[121]

Media scrutiny of private life edit

Relatively little is known about Pynchon's private life; he has carefully avoided contact with reporters for more than fifty years. Only a few photos of him are known to exist, nearly all from his high school and college days, and his whereabouts have often remained undisclosed.

A 1963 review of V. in The New York Times Book Review described Pynchon as "a recluse" living in Mexico, thereby introducing the media label with which journalists have characterized him throughout his career.[122] Nonetheless, Pynchon's personal absence from mass media is one of the notable features of his life, and it has generated many rumors and apocryphal anecdotes.

Pynchon wrote an introduction for his short story collection Slow Learner. His comments on the stories after reading them again for the first time in many years, and his recollection of the events surrounding their creation, amount to the author's only autobiographical comments to his readers.

1970s and 1980s edit

After the publication and success of Gravity's Rainbow, interest mounted in finding out more about the identity of the author. At the 1974 National Book Awards ceremony, the president of Viking Press, Tom Guinzberg, arranged for double-talking comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey to accept the prize on Pynchon's behalf.[26] Many of the assembled guests had no idea who Corey was and had never seen the author, so they assumed it was Pynchon himself on the stage delivering Corey's trademark torrent of rambling, pseudo-scholarly verbiage.[123] Toward the end of Corey's address a streaker ran through the hall, adding further to the confusion.

An article by John Batchelor published in the SoHo Weekly News in 1977 claimed that Pynchon was in fact J. D. Salinger.[124] Pynchon's written response to this theory said that “some of it was true, but none of the interesting parts. Not bad. Keep trying.”[116][125]

Thereafter, the first piece to provide substantial information about Pynchon's personal life was a biographical account written by a former Cornell University friend, Jules Siegel, and published in Playboy magazine. In his article, Siegel reveals that Pynchon had a complex about his teeth and underwent extensive and painful reconstructive surgery, was nicknamed "Tom" at Cornell and attended Mass diligently, acted as best man at Siegel's wedding, and that he later also had an affair with Siegel's wife. Siegel recalls Pynchon saying he did attend some of Vladimir Nabokov's lectures at Cornell but that he could hardly make out what Nabokov was saying because of his thick Russian accent. Siegel also records Pynchon's commenting: "Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength", an observation borne out by the crankiness and zealotry that has attached itself to his name and work in subsequent years.[126]

1990s edit

Pynchon does not like to talk with reporters, and refuses the spectacle of celebrity and public appearances. Some readers and critics have suggested that there were and are perhaps aesthetic (and ideological) motivations behind his choice to remain aloof from public life. For example, the protagonist in Janette Turner Hospital's short story "For Mr. Voss or Occupant" (published in 1991), explains to her daughter that she is writing

a study of authors who become reclusive. Patrick White, Emily Dickinson, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon. The way they create solitary characters and personae and then disappear into their fictions.[111]

More recently, book critic Arthur Salm has written that

the man simply chooses not to be a public figure, an attitude that resonates on a frequency so out of phase with that of the prevailing culture that if Pynchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet—the circumstances, I admit, are beyond imagining—the resulting matter/antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV.[127]

Pynchon has published a number of articles and reviews in the mainstream American media, including words of support for Salman Rushdie and his then-wife, Marianne Wiggins, after the fatwa was pronounced against Rushdie by the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.[128] In the following year, Rushdie's enthusiastic review of Pynchon's Vineland prompted Pynchon to send him another message hinting that if Rushdie were ever in New York, the two should arrange a meeting. Eventually, the two did have dinner together. Rushdie later commented: "He was extremely Pynchon-esque. He was the Pynchon I wanted him to be".[129]

In 1990, Pynchon married his literary agent, Melanie Jackson—a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt and a granddaughter of Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg trials prosecutor—and fathered a son, Jackson, in 1991.[130] The disclosure of Pynchon's 1990s location in New York City, after many years in which he was believed to be dividing his time between Mexico and northern California, led some journalists and photographers to try to track him down. Shortly before the publication of Mason & Dixon in 1997, a CNN camera crew filmed him in Manhattan. Angered by this invasion of his privacy, he called CNN asking that he not be identified in the footage of the street scenes near his home. When asked by CNN, Pynchon rejected their characterization of him as a recluse, remarking "My belief is that 'recluse' is a code word generated by journalists ... meaning, 'doesn't like to talk to reporters'." CNN also quoted him as saying, "Let me be unambiguous. I prefer not to be photographed."[131] The next year, a reporter for the Sunday Times managed to snap a photo of him as he was walking with his son.[132]

After several references to Pynchon's work and reputation were made on NBC's The John Larroquette Show, Pynchon (through his agent) reportedly contacted the series' producers to offer suggestions and corrections. When a local Pynchon sighting became a major plot point in a 1994 episode of the series, Pynchon was sent the script for his approval; as well as providing the title of a fictitious work to be used in one episode ("Pandemonium of the Sun"), the novelist apparently vetoed a final scene that called for an extra playing him to be filmed from behind, walking away from the shot.[131][133] Pynchon also insisted that it should be specifically mentioned in the episode that Pynchon was seen wearing a Roky Erickson T-shirt.[134] According to the Los Angeles Times, this spurred an increase in sales of Erickson's albums.[135] Also during the 1990s, Pynchon befriended members of the band Lotion and contributed liner notes for the band's 1995 album Nobody's Cool. Although the band initially claimed that he had seen them in concert and become a groupie, in 2009 they revealed to The New Yorker that they met him through his accountant, who was drummer Rob Youngberg's mother; she gave him an advance copy of the album and he agreed to write the liner notes, only later seeing them in concert.[136] The novelist then conducted an interview with the band ("Lunch with Lotion") for Esquire in June 1996 in the lead-up to the publication of Mason & Dixon. More recently, Pynchon provided faxed answers to questions submitted by author David Hajdu and permitted excerpts from his personal correspondence to be quoted in Hajdu's 2001 book, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.[137]

Pynchon's insistence on maintaining his personal privacy and on having his work speak for itself has resulted in a number of outlandish rumors and hoaxes over the years. Indeed, claims that Pynchon was the Unabomber or a sympathizer with the Waco Branch Davidians after the 1993 siege were upstaged in the mid-1990s by the invention of an elaborate rumor insinuating that Pynchon and one "Wanda Tinasky" were the same person.[138] A collection of the Tinasky letters was eventually published as a paperback book in 1996; however, Pynchon himself denied having written the letters, and no direct attribution of the letters to Pynchon was ever made. "Literary detective" Donald Foster subsequently showed that the Letters were in fact written by an obscure Beat writer, Tom Hawkins, who had murdered his wife and then committed suicide in 1988. Foster's evidence was conclusive, including finding the typewriter on which the "Tinasky" letters had been written.[139]

In 1998, over 120 letters that Pynchon had written to his longtime agent, Candida Donadio, were donated by the family of a private collector, Carter Burden, to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City. The letters ranged from 1963 to 1982, thus covering some of the author's most creative and prolific years. Although the Morgan Library originally intended to allow scholars to view the letters, at Pynchon's request the Burden family and Morgan Library agreed to seal these letters until after Pynchon's death.[31]

2000s edit

 
Pynchon depicted in The Simpsons episode "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife". His Simpsons appearances are some of the few occasions that Pynchon's voice has been broadcast in the media.

Responding to the image which has been manufactured in the media over the years, Pynchon made two cameo animated appearances on the television series The Simpsons in 2004. The first occurs in the episode "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", in which Marge Simpson becomes a novelist. He plays himself, with a paper bag over his head, and provides a blurb for the back cover of Marge's book, speaking in a broad Long Island accent: "Here's your quote: Thomas Pynchon loved this book, almost as much as he loves cameras!" He then starts yelling at passing cars: "Hey, over here, have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we'll throw in a free autograph! But, wait! There's more!"[140][141] In his second appearance, in "All's Fair in Oven War", Pynchon's dialogue consists entirely of puns on his novel titles ("These wings are V-licious! I'll put this recipe in The Gravity's Rainbow Cookbook, right next to 'The Frying of Latke 49'."). The cartoon representation of Pynchon reappears in a third, non-speaking cameo, as a guest at the fictional WordLoaf convention depicted in the 18th season episode "Moe'N'a Lisa". The episode first aired on November 19, 2006, the Sunday before Pynchon's sixth novel, Against the Day, was released. According to Al Jean on the 15th season DVD episode commentary, Pynchon wanted to do the series because his son was a big fan.

During pre-production of "All's Fair in Oven War", Pynchon faxed one page from the script to producer Matt Selman with several handwritten edits to his lines. Of particular emphasis was Pynchon's outright refusal to utter the line "No wonder Homer is such a fat-ass." Pynchon's objection apparently had nothing to do with the salty language as he explained in a footnote to the edit, "... Homer is my role model and I can't speak ill of him."[142][143]

In celebration of the centenary of George Orwell's birth, Pynchon wrote a new foreword to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. The introduction presents a brief biography of Orwell as well as a reflection on some of the critical responses to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Pynchon also offers his own reflection in the introduction that "what is perhaps [most] important, indeed necessary, to a working prophet, is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul."[144]

In July 2006, Amazon.com created a page showing an upcoming 992-page, untitled, Thomas Pynchon novel. A description of the soon-to-be published novel appeared on Amazon purporting to be written by Pynchon himself. The description was taken down, prompting speculation over its authenticity, but the blurb was soon back up along with the title of Pynchon's new novel Against the Day.

Shortly before Against the Day was published, Pynchon's prose appeared in the program for "The Daily Show: Ten Fu@#ing Years (The Concert)", a retrospective on Jon Stewart's comedy-news broadcast The Daily Show.[145]

On December 6, 2006, Pynchon joined a campaign by many other major authors to clear Ian McEwan of plagiarism charges by sending a typewritten letter to his British publisher, which was published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.[146]

Pynchon's 2009 YouTube promotional teaser for the novel Inherent Vice[147] is the second time a recording of his voice has been released to mainstream outlets (the first being his appearances on The Simpsons).[74]

2010s edit

In 2012, Pynchon's novels were released in e-book format, ending a long holdout by the author. Publisher Penguin Press reported that the novels' length and complex page layouts made it a challenge to convert them to a digital format. Though they had produced a promotional video for the June release, Penguin had no expectation Pynchon's public profile would change in any fashion.[148]

In 2013, his son, Jackson Pynchon, graduated from Columbia University, where he was affiliated with St. Anthony Hall.[149][150]

In September 2014, Josh Brolin told The New York Times that Pynchon had made a cameo in the Inherent Vice film adaptation. This led to a sizable online hunt for the author's appearance, eventually targeting actor Charley Morgan, whose small role as a doctor led many to believe he was Pynchon. Morgan, son of M*A*S*H's Harry Morgan, claimed that Paul Thomas Anderson, whom he described as a friend, had told him that such a cameo did not exist. Despite this, nothing has been directly confirmed by Anderson or Warner Bros. Pictures.[151][152]

On November 6, 2018, Pynchon was photographed near his apartment in New York's Upper West Side district when he went to vote with his son. The photo was published by the National Enquirer and was said to be the first photo of him "in decades".[153]

2020s edit

In December 2022, the Huntington Library announced that it had acquired the literary archive, including typescripts and drafts of each of Pynchon's novels, handwritten notes, correspondence with publishers, and research.[154]

Bibliography edit

Main article: Thomas Pynchon bibliography

See also edit

References edit

  1. ^ As pronounced by Pynchon himself: "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife". The Simpsons. Season 15. Episode 10. Fox. Thomas Pynchon (voiced by the real Thomas Pynchon): Here's your quote: 'Thomas Pynchon loved this book almost as much as he loves cameras.'.
  2. ^ Kachka, Boris (August 25, 2013). "On the Thomas Pynchon Trail: From the Long Island of His Boyhood to the 'Yupper West Side' of His New Novel". New York Magazine. Retrieved December 14, 2022.
  3. ^ . Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on January 20, 2015.
  4. ^ a b "1974 National Book Award winners". National Book Foundation. March 29, 2012. from the original on March 24, 2019. (With essays by Casey Hicks and Chad Post from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog. The mock acceptance speech by Irwin Corey is not reprinted by NBF.)
  5. ^ Krafft, John M. (2012). "Biographical note". In Dalsgaard, Inger H.; Herman, Luc; McHale, Brian (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. Cambridge University Press. p. 10. ISBN 978-0-521-76974-7.
  6. ^ a b c Kachka, Boris (August 25, 2013). "On the Thomas Pynchon Trail: From the Long Island of His Boyhood to the 'Yupper West Side' of His New Novel". Vulture. from the original on February 18, 2020. Retrieved February 12, 2020.
  7. ^ His contributions to the Oyster High Purple & Gold were first reprinted on pp. 156–67 of Clifford Mead's Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials (Dalkey Archive Press, 1989).
  8. ^ Pynchon, Thomas. . The Modern Word. Archived from the original on March 15, 2013. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
  9. ^ Pynchon, Thomas. . The Modern Word. Archived from the original on March 15, 2013. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
  10. ^ Pynchon, Thomas. . The Modern Word. Archived from the original on January 19, 2013. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
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  12. ^ Cowart, David (2011). Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press. p. 3. ISBN 978-0-8203-3709-8.
  13. ^ Krafft, John M. (2012). "Chronology of Pynchon's Life and Works". In Dalsgaard, Inger H.; Herman, Luc; McHale, Brian (eds.). The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. Cambridge University Press. pp. x. ISBN 978-0-521-76974-7.
  14. ^ a b c Pynchon, Thomas (1984). Slow Learner. Little, Brown and Company. pp. 8–32. ISBN 978-0-316-72442-5.
  15. ^ McHale, Brian (1981), Thomas Pychon: A Portrait of the Artist as a Missing Person, in Cencrastus No. 5, Summer 1981, pp. 2 - 7, ISSN 0264-0856
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  22. ^ Wisnicki, Adrian (2000). "A Trove of New Works by Thomas Pynchon? Bomarc Service News Rediscovered". Pynchon Notes. 46–49 (Spring 2000).
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  24. ^ Plimpton, George (April 23, 1963). "The Whole Sick Crew". The New York Times. from the original on January 5, 2023. Retrieved April 8, 2023.
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  26. ^ a b Royster, Paul (June 23, 2005). "Thomas Pynchon: A Brief Chronology". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  27. ^ Pynchon, Thomas (June 12, 1966). . The New York Times Magazine. Archived from the original on February 19, 2006.
  28. ^ ""A Gift of Books" by Edward Albee, Joseph Heller, Alfred Kazin, Thomas Pynchon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and others". Holiday. December 1965. from the original on April 4, 2023. Retrieved April 17, 2023.
  29. ^ "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest Names". National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee. from the original on September 9, 2014. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
  30. ^ "Books: A Myth of Alligators". Time. March 15, 1963.
  31. ^ a b c Gussow, Mel (March 4, 1998). "Pynchon's Letters Nudge His Mask". The New York Times. from the original on August 19, 2014. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
  32. ^ Johnson, Ted (April 20, 1995). "A Tour De Force: From LAX Tower to 'Pulp Fiction' Diner to Stars' Hangouts, Pop Culture Landmarks Dot Landscape Here – Page 2". Los Angeles Times. from the original on December 4, 2013. Retrieved August 21, 2013.
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  34. ^ a b Kihss, Peter (May 8, 1974). "Pulitzer Jurors Dismayed on Pynchon". The New York Times. from the original on July 31, 2017. Retrieved September 19, 2017.
  35. ^ "Awards: Literature". American Academy of Arts and Letters. from the original on January 14, 2022. Retrieved January 14, 2022.
  36. ^ "All-TIME 100 Novels". Time. ISSN 0040-781X. Retrieved April 9, 2023.
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  38. ^ a b Chambers, Judith (1992). Thomas Pynchon. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-3960-2.
  39. ^ Fowler, Douglas (1980). A Reader's Guide to Gravity's Rainbow. Ardis Press. ISBN 978-0-88233-405-9.
  40. ^ a b Weisenburger, Steven C. (1988). A Gravity's Rainbow Companion: Sources and Contexts for Pynchon's Novel. University of Georgia Press. ISBN 978-0-8203-1026-8.
  41. ^ Ruch, Allen. . The Modern Word. Archived from the original on September 15, 2010. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
  42. ^ Almansi, Guido (1994). L'estetica dell'osceno. Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi. p. 226.
  43. ^ McHale, Brian (1987). Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-415-04513-1.
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  45. ^ Pettman, Dominic (2002). "Thomas Pynchon". In Bertens, Hans; Natoli, Joseph (eds.). Postmodernism: The Key Figures. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. pp. 261–266. ISBN 978-0-631-21796-1.
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  49. ^ Pynchon, Thomas (October 28, 1984). "Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?". The New York Times. from the original on December 6, 2016. Retrieved October 24, 2016.
  50. ^ Pynchon, Thomas (April 10, 1988). "The Heart's Eternal Vow". The New York Times. from the original on April 24, 2017. Retrieved February 13, 2017.
  51. ^ Pynchon, Thomas (June 6, 1993). "The Deadly Sins/Sloth; Nearer, My Couch, to Thee". The New York Times. from the original on February 1, 2017. Retrieved October 24, 2016.
  52. ^ "Words for Salman Rushdie". The New York Times. March 12, 1989. from the original on April 4, 2023. Retrieved April 4, 2023.
  53. ^ {{Cite news author=last=Salman Rushdie |date=January 14, 1990 |title=Still Crazy After All These Years |work=The New York Times |url=https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-vineland.html |access-date=January 5, 2023 |archive-date=November 1, 2022 |archive-url= |url-status=live }}
  54. ^ Berressem, Hanjo (1992). Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. pp. 236–7. ISBN 978-0-252-01919-7.
  55. ^ Gray, Paul (October 18, 1993). "Rooms of Their Own". Time Magazine. from the original on August 14, 2014. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
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  57. ^ Rising, Malin (October 9, 2008). "Nobel literature: Will an American win after all?". USA Today. from the original on September 23, 2015. Retrieved September 26, 2014.
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  61. ^ Bloom, Harold (2003). Thomas Pynchon. Chelsea House. ISBN 978-0-7910-7030-7.
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Further reading edit

  • Kharpertian, Theodore D. Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern American Satire pp. 20–2, in Kharpertian A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon.
  • McHale, Brian (1981), Thomas Pychon: A Portrait of the Artist as a Missing Person. Cencrastus No. 5 (Summer 1981), pp. 2 – 7, ISSN 0264-0856
  • Stevenson, Randall (1983). Review of The Small Rain. Cencrastus, No. 11 (New Year 1983), pp. 40 & 41, ISSN 0264-0856

External links edit

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  • Inherent Vice Diagrammed A reader's guide to Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice, with diagrams showing all the character relationships, a character-relationship index, and chapter and plot summaries.
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  • Pynchon in Public Podcast, a podcast going through each of Pynchon's novels, one episode at a time.
  • Spermatikos Logos - Thomas Pynchon on The Modern Word

January 01, 1970
thomas, pynchon, thomas, ruggles, pynchon, chon, commonly, chən, born, 1937, american, novelist, noted, dense, complex, novels, fiction, fiction, writings, encompass, vast, array, subject, matter, genres, themes, including, history, music, science, mathematics. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr ˈ p ɪ n tʃ ɒ n PIN chon 1 2 commonly ˈ p ɪ n tʃ en PIN chen 3 born May 8 1937 is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels His fiction and non fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter genres and themes including history music science and mathematics For Gravity s Rainbow Pynchon won the 1973 U S National Book Award for Fiction 4 Thomas PynchonPynchon in 1953 yearbook imageBornThomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr 1937 05 08 May 8 1937 age 86 Glen Cove New York U S EducationCornell University BA Periodc 1959 presentNotable worksV 1963 The Crying of Lot 49 1966 Gravity s Rainbow 1973 Mason amp Dixon 1997 Inherent Vice 2009 See bibliographySpouseMelanie Jackson m 1990 wbr Children1Signature Hailing from Long Island Pynchon served 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 V 1963 The Crying of Lot 49 1966 and Gravity s Rainbow 1973 Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as the 1980s the novel Mason amp Dixon was published in 1997 to critical acclaim His 2009 novel Inherent Vice was adapted into a feature film by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014 Pynchon is notoriously reclusive from the media few photographs of him have been published and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s Pynchon s most recent novel Bleeding Edge was published on September 17 2013 Contents 1 Early life 1 1 Education and military career 2 Career 2 1 Early career 2 1 1 V 2 1 2 The Crying of Lot 49 2 1 3 Gravity s Rainbow 2 2 Later career 2 2 1 Vineland 2 2 2 Mason amp Dixon 2 2 3 Against the Day 2 2 4 Inherent Vice 2 2 5 Bleeding Edge 3 Style 4 Themes 5 Influence 5 1 Precursors 5 2 Legacy 6 Media scrutiny of private life 6 1 1970s and 1980s 6 2 1990s 6 3 2000s 6 4 2010s 6 5 2020s 7 Bibliography 8 See also 9 References 10 Further reading 11 External linksEarly life edit nbsp Pynchon age 16 in his high school senior portrait Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8 1937 in Glen Cove Long Island New York 5 one of three children of engineer and politician Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Sr 1907 1995 and Katherine Frances Bennett 1909 1996 a nurse During his childhood Pynchon alternately attended Episcopal services with his father and Roman Catholic services with his mother 6 Education and military career edit A voracious reader and precocious writer Pynchon is believed to have skipped two grades before high school 6 Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School in Oyster Bay where he was awarded student of the year and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper These juvenilia incorporated some of the literary motifs and recurring subject matter he would use throughout his career oddball names sophomoric humor illicit drug use and paranoia 7 8 9 10 Thomas Pynchon nbsp Pynchon c 1955Allegiance nbsp United StatesBranch nbsp United States NavyService years1955 1957Service number4881936 11 Pynchon graduated from high school in 1953 at the age of 16 That fall he went to Cornell University to study engineering physics At the end of his sophomore year he enlisted to serve in the U S Navy He attended boot camp at United States Naval Training Center Bainbridge Maryland then received training to be an electrician at a base in Norfolk Virginia 12 In 1956 he was aboard the destroyer USS Hank in the Mediterranean during the Suez Crisis 13 According to recollections from his Navy friends Pynchon said at the time that he did not intend to complete his college education 6 nbsp During his time as a US Navy sailor Pynchon is believed to have served aboard the USS Hank during the Suez Crisis 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 March 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 14 His short story Mortality and Mercy in Vienna was published in the Spring 1959 issue of Epoch 15 While at Cornell Pynchon started his friendships with Richard Farina Kirkpatrick Sale and David Shetzline 16 Pynchon would go on to dedicate Gravity s Rainbow to Farina and to serve as his best man and his pallbearer In his introduction to Farina s novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me Pynchon recalls that we also succeeded in getting on the same literary wavelength We showed up once at a party not a masquerade party in disguise he as Hemingway I as Scott Fitzgerald each of us aware that the other had been through a phase of enthusiasm for his respective author Also in 59 we simultaneously picked up on what I still think is among the finest American novels Oakley Hall s Warlock We set about getting others to read it too and for a while we had a micro cult going Soon a number of us were talking in Warlock dialogue a kind of thoughtful stylized Victorian Wild West diction 17 Richard Farina also wrote an instrumental V which is on the album Celebrations For A Grey Day 18 He reportedly attended lectures given by Vladimir Nabokov who then taught literature at Cornell Although Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon Nabokov s wife Vera who graded her husband s class papers commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting as a mixture of printed and cursive letters half printing half script 19 20 In 1958 Pynchon and Sale wrote part or all of a science fiction musical Minstrel Island which portrayed a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world 21 Pynchon received his B A with distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in June 1959 Career editEarly career edit V edit Main article V nbsp V 1963 After leaving Cornell Pynchon began to work on his first novel V 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 a support newsletter for the BOMARC surface to air missile deployed by the U S Air Force 22 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 V won the William Faulkner Foundation Award For Notable First Novel and was a finalist for the National Book Award 23 George Plimpton gave the book a positive review in The New York Times He described it as a picaresque novel in which The author can tell his favorite jokes throw in a song indulge in a fantasy include his own verse display an intimate knowledge of such disparate subjects as physics astronomy art jazz how a nose job is done the wildlife in the New York sewage system These indeed are some of the topics which constitute a recent and remarkable example of the genre a brilliant and turbulent first novel published this month by a young Cornell graduate Thomas Pynchon Plimpton called Pynchon a writer of staggering promise 24 After resigning from Boeing Pynchon spent some 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 25 as he was composing what would become Gravity s Rainbow A negative aspect that Pynchon retrospectively found in the hippie cultural and literary movement both in the form of the Beats of the 1950s and the resurgence form of the 1960s was that it placed too much emphasis on youth including the eternal variety 14 In 1964 his application to study mathematics as a graduate student at the University of California Berkeley was turned down 26 In 1966 Pynchon wrote a first hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles titled A Journey Into the Mind of Watts and published in The New York Times Magazine 27 From the mid 1960s Pynchon has also regularly provided blurbs and introductions for a wide range of novels and non fiction works He contributed an appreciation of Oakley Hall s Warlock in a feature called A Gift of Books in the December 1965 issue of Holiday Pynchon wrote that Hall has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full mortal blooded humanity It is this deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock I think one of our best American novels For we are a nation that can many of us toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself snap a color shot and drive away and we need voices like Oakley Hall s to remind us how far that piece of paper still fluttering brightly behind us has to fall 28 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 29 Time s review of V concluded V sails with majesty through caverns measureless to man What does it mean Who finally is V Few books haunt the waking or the sleeping mind but this is one Who indeed 30 The Crying of Lot 49 edit Main article The Crying of Lot 49 nbsp Pynchon created the muted post horn as a symbol for the secret Trystero society in The Crying of Lot 49 In an April 1964 letter to his agent Candida Donadio Pynchon wrote that he was facing a creative crisis with four novels in progress announcing If they come out on paper anything like they are inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium 31 In the mid 1960s Pynchon lived at 217 33rd St in Manhattan Beach California in a small downstairs apartment 32 In December 1965 Pynchon politely turned down an invitation from Stanley Edgar Hyman to teach literature at Bennington College writing that he had resolved two or three years earlier to write three novels at once Pynchon described the decision as a moment of temporary insanity but noted that he was too stubborn to let any of them go let alone all of them 33 Pynchon s second novel The Crying of Lot 49 was published a few months later in 1966 Whether it was one of the three or four novels Pynchon had in progress is not known but in a 1965 letter to Donadio Pynchon had written that he was in the middle of writing a potboiler When the book grew to 155 pages he called it a short story but with gland trouble and hoped that Donadio could unload it on some poor sucker 31 The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award shortly after publication 34 35 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 called 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 events 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 The Crying of Lot 49 also continues Pynchon s habits of writing satiric song lyrics and referencing popular culture An example of both can be seen in allusion to the narrator of Nabokov s Lolita in the lyric of a love lament sung by a member of The Paranoids an American teenage band who deliberately sing their songs with British accents p 17 Despite Pynchon s alleged dislike Lot 49 received positive reviews Harold Bloom named it one of Pynchon s canonical works along with Gravity s Rainbow and Mason amp Dixon It was included on Time s list of the 100 best English language novels published since the magazine s founding in 1923 Richard Lacayao wrote With its slapstick paranoia and heartbreaking metaphysical soliloquies Lot 49 takes place in the tragicomic universe that is instantly recognizable as Pynchon land Is it also a mystery novel Absolutely so long as you recognize the mystery here is the one at the heart of everything 36 Gravity s Rainbow edit Main article Gravity s Rainbow nbsp Gravity s Rainbow 1973 Pynchon s most famous novel is his third Gravity s Rainbow published in 1973 An intricate and allusive fiction that combines and elaborates on many of the themes of his earlier work including preterition paranoia racism colonialism conspiracy synchronicity and entropy 37 38 there is a wealth of commentary and critical material including reader s guides 39 40 books and scholarly articles online concordances and discussions and art works Its artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce s Ulysses 41 Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post WW2 novel 42 and it has similarly been described as literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices 43 Richard Locke reviewing it in The New York Times wrote that Gravity s Rainbow is longer darker and more difficult than his first two books in fact it is the longest most difficult and most ambitious novel to appear in these pages since Nabokov s Ada four years ago its technical and verbal resources bring to mind Melville and Faulkner 44 The major portion of Gravity s Rainbow takes place in Europe in the final months of World War II 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 and except as hints premonitions and mythography the complicity between Western corporate interests and the Nazi war machine which figure prominently in readers apprehensions of the novel s historical context For example at war s end the narrator observes There are rumors of a War Crimes Tribunal under way in Nurnberg No one Slothrop has listened to is clear who s trying whom for what p 681 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 Pynchon presents us with a Disney meets Bosch panorama of European politics American entropy industrial history and libidinal panic which leaves a chaotic whirl of fractal patterns in the reader s mind 45 If they can get you asking the wrong questions they don t have to worry about answers Gravity s Rainbow The novel invokes anti authority sentiments often through violations of narrative conventions and integrity For example as the protagonist Tyrone Slothrop considers the fact that his own family made its money killing trees he apostrophizes his apology and plea for advice to the coppice within which he has momentarily taken refuge In an overt incitement to eco activism Pynchon s narrative agency then has it that a medium sized pine nearby nods its top and suggests Next time you come across a logging operation out here find one of their tractors that isn t being guarded and take its oil filter with you That s what you can do p 553 Encyclopedic in scope and often self conscious in style the novel displays erudition in its treatment of an array of material drawn from the fields of psychology chemistry mathematics history religion music literature human sexuality and film Pynchon wrote the first draft of Gravity s Rainbow in neat tiny script on engineer s quadrille paper 40 Pynchon worked on the novel throughout the 1960s and early 1970s while he was living in California and Mexico City Gravity s Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer split award 4 That same year the Pulitzer Prize For Fiction panel unanimously recommended Gravity s Rainbow for the award but the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury s recommendation describing the novel as unreadable turgid overwritten and in parts obscene 34 No Pulitzer Prize For Fiction was awarded that year and finalists were not recognized before 1980 46 In 1975 Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal 47 Along with Lot 49 Gravity s Rainbow was included on Time s list of the 100 greatest English language novels published since the magazine s founding with Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayao commenting on its fantastic multitude of meditations upon the human need to build systems of intellectual order even as we use the same powers of intellect to hasten our destruction Did we mention that this is also a comedy more or less Among American writers of the second half of the 20th century Pynchon is the indisputed candidate for lasting literary greatness This book is why 48 His earliest American ancestor William Pynchon emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630 then became the founder of Springfield Massachusetts in 1636 and thereafter a long line of Pynchon descendants found wealth and repute on American soil Aspects of Pynchon s ancestry and family background have partially inspired his fiction writing particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in the short story The Secret Integration 1964 and Gravity s Rainbow 1973 citation needed Later career edit nbsp Slow Learner 1984 A collection of Pynchon s early short stories Slow Learner was published in 1984 with a lengthy autobiographical introduction In October of the same year an article titled Is It O K to Be a Luddite was published in The New York Times Book Review 49 In April 1988 Pynchon reviewed Gabriel Garcia Marquez s Love in the Time of Cholera in The New York Times calling it a shining and heartbreaking book 50 Another article titled 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 51 In 1989 Pynchon was one of many authors who signed a letter of solidarity with Salman Rushdie after Rushdie was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah for his novel The Satanic Verses Pynchon wrote I pray that tolerance and respect for life prevail I keep thinking of you 52 Vineland edit Main article Vineland Pynchon s fourth novel Vineland was published in 1990 and disappointed some fans and critics It did however receive a positive review from Salman Rushdie who called it free flowing and light and funny and maybe the most readily accessible piece of writing the old Invisible Man ever came up with the entropy s still flowing but there is something new to report some faint possibility of redemption some fleeting hints of happiness and grace Thomas Pynchon like Paul Simon s girl in New York City who calls herself the Human Trampoline is bouncing into Graceland 53 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 54 In 1988 he received a MacArthur Fellowship and since the early 1990s at least he has been frequently cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature 55 56 57 Pynchon provided a blurb for Don DeLillo s novel Mao II about a reclusive novelist and partly inspired by the fatwa on Salman Rushdie This novel s a beauty DeLillo takes us on a breathtaking journey beyond all the official versions of our daily history behind all the easy assumptions about who we re supposed to be with a vision as bold and a voice as eloquent and morally focused as any in American writing 58 Mason amp Dixon edit Main article Mason amp Dixon nbsp nbsp Mason amp Dixon 1997 is a fictionalized account of the lives of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon the historical surveyors of the Mason Dixon line 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 the drawers of the Mason Dixon line during the birth of the American Republic The dust jacket notes that it features appearances from George Washington Benjamin Franklin Samuel Johnson and a talking dog Some commentators acknowledged it as a welcome return to form T C Boyle called it the old Pynchon the true Pynchon the best Pynchon of all and a book of heart and fire and genius 59 Michiko Kakutani called Mason and Dixon Pynchon s most human characters writing that they become fully fleshed out people their feelings hopes and yearnings made as palpably real as their outrageously comic high jinks 60 The American critic Harold Bloom hailed the novel as Pynchon s masterpiece to date 61 Bloom named Pynchon as one of the four major American novelists of his time along with Cormac McCarthy Philip Roth and Don DeLillo 62 63 For The Independent feature Book Of A Lifetime Marek Kohn chose Mason amp Dixon precisely because my own teens were long gone by the time it came out it showed me that being exhilarated by prose is not just an effect of youthful overexcitement 64 Against the Day edit Main article Against the Day A variety of rumors pertaining to the subject matter of Against the Day circulated for 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 Gottingen and that the new novel would trace the life and loves of Sofia Kovalevskaya 65 In July 2006 a new untitled novel by Pynchon was announced along with a description written by Pynchon himself Spanning the period between the Chicago World s Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn of the century New York to London and Gottingen Venice and Vienna the Balkans Central Asia Siberia at the times of the mysterious Tunguska Event Mexico during the Revolution postwar Paris silent era Hollywood and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead 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 promised 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 to be Against the Day and a Penguin spokesperson confirmed that the synopsis was Pynchon s 66 67 Against the Day was released on 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 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 Composed in part of a series of interwoven pastiches of popular fiction genres from the era in which it is set the novel inspired mixed reactions from critics and reviewers One reviewer remarked It is brilliant but it is exhaustingly brilliant 68 Other reviewers described Against the Day as lengthy and rambling 69 and a baggy monster of a book 70 while negative appraisals condemned the novel for its silliness 71 or characterized its action as fairly pointless and remained unimpressed by its grab bag of themes 72 In 2006 Pynchon wrote a letter defending Ian McEwan against charges of plagiarism in his novel Atonement Oddly enough those of us who write historical fiction do feel some obligation to accuracy It is that Ruskin business about a capacity of responsiveness to the claims of fact but unoppressed by them Unless we were actually there we must turn to people who were or to letters contemporary reporting the encyclopedia the Internet until with luck at some point we can begin to make a few things of our own up To discover in the course of research some engaging detail we know can be put into a story where it will do some good can hardly be classed as a felonious act it is simply what we do 73 Inherent Vice edit Main articles Inherent Vice and Inherent Vice film Inherent Vice was published in August 2009 A synopsis and brief extract from the novel along with the novel s title Inherent Vice and dust jacket image were printed in Penguin Press Summer 2009 catalogue The book was advertised by the publisher as part noir part psychedelic romp all Thomas Pynchon private eye Doc Sportello comes occasionally out of a cannabis haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L A fog A promotional video for the novel was released by Penguin Books on August 4 2009 with the character voiceover narrated by Pynchon himself 74 A 2014 film adaptation of the same name was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson Bleeding Edge edit Main article Bleeding Edge novel Bleeding Edge takes place in Manhattan s Silicon Alley during the lull between the collapse of the dot com boom and the terrible events of September 11 The novel was published on September 17 2013 75 to positive reviews Style editPoet L E Sissman wrote in The New Yorker He is almost a mathematician of prose who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line each pun and ambiguity can bear and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses though he takes many scary bracing linguistic risks Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar without pause into the sounds and echoes of a drugged and drunken orgy 76 Pynchon often engages in parodies or pastiches of other styles Mason amp Dixon is written in the style of the eighteenth century when it takes place Anthony Lane reviewing the novel in The New Yorker writes that It sounds and more important looks like a period novel it comes bedecked with archaic spellings complex punctuation words like Nebulosity Fescue pinguid and G d This is hard to fault as pastiche and yet it moves beyond pastiche with none of the cramped self amusement that usually attends the genre What is more it bears the signature wholly unmistakable but written as it were in invisible ink of Pynchon himself Pynchon includes deliberate anachronisms Lane notes that the shipboard scenes include an honorary mention of a sailor named Pat O Brian the best Yarn Spinner in all the fleets and the current president might allow himself a small smile at the advice on Indian hemp which is offered to Cherrycoke as he prepares to set sail If you must use the latter do not inhale Keep your memory working young man Whether Thomas Pynchon himself would heed this counsel is hard to decide His memory seems as ever not only to have gorged itself on facts and figures but to have kept the whole lot down On the other hand this book could have been conceived in the fumes of inhalation it has a dreamed quality an eagerness to be haunted Pynchon is furiously clever but more important and I suspect more enduring is his anatomy of melancholy his conjuring of a doleful burlesque Good luck and G dspeed 77 Pynchon s prose with its wide range of styles and subjects is commonly classified as postmodern 78 79 80 Pynchon makes frequent allusions to other authors in the introduction to Slow Learner a collection of his early short stories he acknowledges his debts to the modernists especially T S Eliot s The Waste Land and to the Beats particularly Jack Kerouac s On the Road He also writes of the influence of jazz and rock and roll and satiric song lyrics and mock musical numbers are a trademark of his fiction In his essay Smoking Dope With Thomas Pynchon A Sixties Memoir Andrew Gordon writes Kerouac s heroes were filled with romantic angst and an unfulfilled yearning to burn like roman candles whereas Pynchon s were clowns schlemiels and human yo yos bouncing between farce and paranoia Kerouac was of the cool fifties he wrote jazz fiction But Pynchon was of the apocalyptic sixties he wrote rock and roll 81 Themes editIn her review of Mason amp Dixon Michiko Kakutani writes The Great Big Theme in all of Thomas Pynchon s novels from V 1963 through Gravity s Rainbow 1973 and Vineland 1990 has been Is the world dominated by conspiracy or chaos Are there patterns secret codes hidden agendas in short a hidden design to the bubble and turmoil of human existence or is it all a product of chance Are the paranoiacs onto something or do the nihilists have the key to it all 60 Pynchon s work explores philosophical theological and sociological ideas exhaustively though in quirky and approachable ways His writings demonstrate 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 has been seen as one of the defining characteristics of his writing 82 83 Pynchon makes frequent musical allusions McClintic Sphere in V is a composite of 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 amp Dixon one of the characters plays on the Clavier the varsity drinking song that will later become The Star Spangled Banner while in another episode a character remarks tangentially Sometimes it s hard to be a woman He also alludes to classical music in V a character sings an aria from Mozart s Don Giovanni In Lot 49 Oedipa listens to the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble s variorum recording of the Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto Boyd Beaver soloist In his introduction to Slow Learner Pynchon acknowledges a debt to the anarchic bandleader Spike Jones and in 1994 he penned a 3 000 word set of liner notes for the album Spiked a collection of Jones s recordings released on the short lived BMG Catalyst label 84 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 known to be a fan of Roky Erickson 85 Investigations and digressions into 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 based on it was a lousy way to go about writing a story Another early story Under the Rose 1961 includes among its cast of characters a cyborg set anachronistically in Victorian era Egypt a precursor of what is 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 erotica and features numerous episodes of drug use most notably cannabis 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 Mason amp Dixon explores the scientific theological and socio cultural foundations of the Age of Reason while 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 historiographic metafiction Influence editPrecursors edit Pynchon s novels refer overtly to writers as disparate as Henry Adams in V p 62 Jorge Luis Borges in Gravity s Rainbow p 264 Deleuze and Guattari in Vineland p 97 86 Emily Dickinson in Gravity s Rainbow pp 27 8 Umberto Eco in Mason amp Dixon p 559 87 Ralph Waldo Emerson in Vineland p 369 Hopkins T S Eliot di Chirico s novel Hebdomeros in V p 307 William March citation needed Vladimir Nabokov in The Crying of Lot 49 p 120 Patrick O Brian in Mason amp Dixon p 54 Ishmael Reed in Gravity s Rainbow p 558 Rainer Maria Rilke in Gravity s Rainbow p 97 f and Ludwig Wittgenstein in V p 278 f and to a heady mixture of iconic religious and philosophical sources 88 89 90 91 Critics have made comparisons of Pynchon s writing with works by Rabelais 92 93 Cervantes 92 94 Laurence Sterne 95 96 Edgar Allan Poe 97 98 Nathaniel Hawthorne 99 100 Herman Melville 92 101 Charles Dickens 102 103 Joseph Conrad 104 105 Thomas Mann 106 107 William S Burroughs 108 109 Ralph Ellison 109 110 Patrick White 111 112 and Toni Morrison 90 113 Pynchon s work also has similarities with modernist writers who wrote long novels dealing with large metaphysical or political issues such as James Joyce s Ulysses E M Forster s A Passage to India Wyndham Lewis s The Apes of God Robert Musil s The Man Without Qualities and John Dos Passos s U S A trilogy 38 114 115 116 117 He also outlines the influence on his own early fiction of literary works by Ernest Hemingway Henry Miller Saul Bellow Herbert Gold Philip Roth Norman Mailer John Buchan and Graham Greene and non fiction works by Helen Waddell Norbert Wiener and Isaac Asimov 14 Legacy edit Pynchon s work has been cited as an influence and inspiration by many writers among them Elfriede Jelinek who translated Gravity s Rainbow into German David Foster Wallace William T Vollmann Richard Powers Steve Erickson David Mitchell Neal Stephenson Dave Eggers William Gibson T C Boyle Salman Rushdie Alan Moore and Tommaso Pincio whose pseudonym is an Italian rendering of Pynchon s name 118 Thanks to his influence on Gibson and Stephenson in particular Pynchon became one of the progenitors of cyberpunk fiction a 1987 essay in Spin magazine by Timothy Leary explicitly named Gravity s Rainbow as the Old Testament of cyberpunk with Gibson s Neuromancer and its sequels as the New Testament Though the term cyberpunk did not become prevalent until the early 1980s since Leary s article many readers have retroactively included Gravity s Rainbow in the genre along with other works Samuel R Delany s Dhalgren and many works of Philip K Dick which seem in hindsight to anticipate cyberpunk styles and themes The encyclopedic nature of Pynchon s novels also led to some attempts to link his work with the hypertext fiction movement of the 1990s 119 Ian Rankin author of the Inspector Rebus mystery novels called encountering Pynchon in college a revelation Pynchon seemed to fit the model I was learning of literature as an extended code or grail quest Moreover he was like a drug as you worked out one layer of meaning you quickly wanted to move to the next He wrote action novels about spies and soldiers which also happened to be detective stories and bawdy romps His books were picaresquely post modern and his humour was Marxian tendance Groucho On page six of The Crying of Lot 49 the name Quackenbush appears and you know you are in safely comedic hands 120 The main belt asteroid 152319 is named after Pynchon 121 Media scrutiny of private life editRelatively little is known about Pynchon s private life he has carefully avoided contact with reporters for more than fifty years Only a few photos of him are known to exist nearly all from his high school and college days and his whereabouts have often remained undisclosed A 1963 review of V in The New York Times Book Review described Pynchon as a recluse living in Mexico thereby introducing the media label with which journalists have characterized him throughout his career 122 Nonetheless Pynchon s personal absence from mass media is one of the notable features of his life and it has generated many rumors and apocryphal anecdotes Pynchon wrote an introduction for his short story collection Slow Learner His comments on the stories after reading them again for the first time in many years and his recollection of the events surrounding their creation amount to the author s only autobiographical comments to his readers 1970s and 1980s edit After the publication and success of Gravity s Rainbow interest mounted in finding out more about the identity of the author At the 1974 National Book Awards ceremony the president of Viking Press Tom Guinzberg arranged for double talking comedian Professor Irwin Corey to accept the prize on Pynchon s behalf 26 Many of the assembled guests had no idea who Corey was and had never seen the author so they assumed it was Pynchon himself on the stage delivering Corey s trademark torrent of rambling pseudo scholarly verbiage 123 Toward the end of Corey s address a streaker ran through the hall adding further to the confusion An article by John Batchelor published in the SoHo Weekly News in 1977 claimed that Pynchon was in fact J D Salinger 124 Pynchon s written response to this theory said that some of it was true but none of the interesting parts Not bad Keep trying 116 125 Thereafter the first piece to provide substantial information about Pynchon s personal life was a biographical account written by a former Cornell University friend Jules Siegel and published in Playboy magazine In his article Siegel reveals that Pynchon had a complex about his teeth and underwent extensive and painful reconstructive surgery was nicknamed Tom at Cornell and attended Mass diligently acted as best man at Siegel s wedding and that he later also had an affair with Siegel s wife Siegel recalls Pynchon saying he did attend some of Vladimir Nabokov s lectures at Cornell but that he could hardly make out what Nabokov was saying because of his thick Russian accent Siegel also records Pynchon s commenting Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength an observation borne out by the crankiness and zealotry that has attached itself to his name and work in subsequent years 126 1990s edit Pynchon does not like to talk with reporters and refuses the spectacle of celebrity and public appearances Some readers and critics have suggested that there were and are perhaps aesthetic and ideological motivations behind his choice to remain aloof from public life For example the protagonist in Janette Turner Hospital s short story For Mr Voss or Occupant published in 1991 explains to her daughter that she is writing a study of authors who become reclusive Patrick White Emily Dickinson J D Salinger Thomas Pynchon The way they create solitary characters and personae and then disappear into their fictions 111 More recently book critic Arthur Salm has written that the man simply chooses not to be a public figure an attitude that resonates on a frequency so out of phase with that of the prevailing culture that if Pynchon and Paris Hilton were ever to meet the circumstances I admit are beyond imagining the resulting matter antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here to Tau Ceti IV 127 Pynchon has published a number of articles and reviews in the mainstream American media including words of support for Salman Rushdie and his then wife Marianne Wiggins after the fatwa was pronounced against Rushdie by the Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini 128 In the following year Rushdie s enthusiastic review of Pynchon s Vineland prompted Pynchon to send him another message hinting that if Rushdie were ever in New York the two should arrange a meeting Eventually the two did have dinner together Rushdie later commented He was extremely Pynchon esque He was the Pynchon I wanted him to be 129 In 1990 Pynchon married his literary agent Melanie Jackson a great granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt and a granddaughter of Robert H Jackson U S Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg trials prosecutor and fathered a son Jackson in 1991 130 The disclosure of Pynchon s 1990s location in New York City after many years in which he was believed to be dividing his time between Mexico and northern California led some journalists and photographers to try to track him down Shortly before the publication of Mason amp Dixon in 1997 a CNN camera crew filmed him in Manhattan Angered by this invasion of his privacy he called CNN asking that he not be identified in the footage of the street scenes near his home When asked by CNN Pynchon rejected their characterization of him as a recluse remarking My belief is that recluse is a code word generated by journalists meaning doesn t like to talk to reporters CNN also quoted him as saying Let me be unambiguous I prefer not to be photographed 131 The next year a reporter for the Sunday Times managed to snap a photo of him as he was walking with his son 132 After several references to Pynchon s work and reputation were made on NBC s The John Larroquette Show Pynchon through his agent reportedly contacted the series producers to offer suggestions and corrections When a local Pynchon sighting became a major plot point in a 1994 episode of the series Pynchon was sent the script for his approval as well as providing the title of a fictitious work to be used in one episode Pandemonium of the Sun the novelist apparently vetoed a final scene that called for an extra playing him to be filmed from behind walking away from the shot 131 133 Pynchon also insisted that it should be specifically mentioned in the episode that Pynchon was seen wearing a Roky Erickson T shirt 134 According to the Los Angeles Times this spurred an increase in sales of Erickson s albums 135 Also during the 1990s Pynchon befriended members of the band Lotion and contributed liner notes for the band s 1995 album Nobody s Cool Although the band initially claimed that he had seen them in concert and become a groupie in 2009 they revealed to The New Yorker that they met him through his accountant who was drummer Rob Youngberg s mother she gave him an advance copy of the album and he agreed to write the liner notes only later seeing them in concert 136 The novelist then conducted an interview with the band Lunch with Lotion for Esquire in June 1996 in the lead up to the publication of Mason amp Dixon More recently Pynchon provided faxed answers to questions submitted by author David Hajdu and permitted excerpts from his personal correspondence to be quoted in Hajdu s 2001 book Positively 4th Street The Lives and Times of Joan Baez Bob Dylan Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina 137 Pynchon s insistence on maintaining his personal privacy and on having his work speak for itself has resulted in a number of outlandish rumors and hoaxes over the years Indeed claims that Pynchon was the Unabomber or a sympathizer with the Waco Branch Davidians after the 1993 siege were upstaged in the mid 1990s by the invention of an elaborate rumor insinuating that Pynchon and one Wanda Tinasky were the same person 138 A collection of the Tinasky letters was eventually published as a paperback book in 1996 however Pynchon himself denied having written the letters and no direct attribution of the letters to Pynchon was ever made Literary detective Donald Foster subsequently showed that the Letters were in fact written by an obscure Beat writer Tom Hawkins who had murdered his wife and then committed suicide in 1988 Foster s evidence was conclusive including finding the typewriter on which the Tinasky letters had been written 139 In 1998 over 120 letters that Pynchon had written to his longtime agent Candida Donadio were donated by the family of a private collector Carter Burden to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City The letters ranged from 1963 to 1982 thus covering some of the author s most creative and prolific years Although the Morgan Library originally intended to allow scholars to view the letters at Pynchon s request the Burden family and Morgan Library agreed to seal these letters until after Pynchon s death 31 2000s edit nbsp Pynchon depicted in The Simpsons episode Diatribe of a Mad Housewife His Simpsons appearances are some of the few occasions that Pynchon s voice has been broadcast in the media Responding to the image which has been manufactured in the media over the years Pynchon made two cameo animated appearances on the television series The Simpsons in 2004 The first occurs in the episode Diatribe of a Mad Housewife in which Marge Simpson becomes a novelist He plays himself with a paper bag over his head and provides a blurb for the back cover of Marge s book speaking in a broad Long Island accent Here s your quote Thomas Pynchon loved this book almost as much as he loves cameras He then starts yelling at passing cars Hey over here have your picture taken with a reclusive author Today only we ll throw in a free autograph But wait There s more 140 141 In his second appearance in All s Fair in Oven War Pynchon s dialogue consists entirely of puns on his novel titles These wings are V licious I ll put this recipe in The Gravity s Rainbow Cookbook right next to The Frying of Latke 49 The cartoon representation of Pynchon reappears in a third non speaking cameo as a guest at the fictional WordLoaf convention depicted in the 18th season episode Moe N a Lisa The episode first aired on November 19 2006 the Sunday before Pynchon s sixth novel Against the Day was released According to Al Jean on the 15th season DVD episode commentary Pynchon wanted to do the series because his son was a big fan During pre production of All s Fair in Oven War Pynchon faxed one page from the script to producer Matt Selman with several handwritten edits to his lines Of particular emphasis was Pynchon s outright refusal to utter the line No wonder Homer is such a fat ass Pynchon s objection apparently had nothing to do with the salty language as he explained in a footnote to the edit Homer is my role model and I can t speak ill of him 142 143 In celebration of the centenary of George Orwell s birth Pynchon wrote a new foreword to Orwell s Nineteen Eighty Four The introduction presents a brief biography of Orwell as well as a reflection on some of the critical responses to Nineteen Eighty Four Pynchon also offers his own reflection in the introduction that what is perhaps most important indeed necessary to a working prophet is to be able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul 144 In July 2006 Amazon com created a page showing an upcoming 992 page untitled Thomas Pynchon novel A description of the soon to be published novel appeared on Amazon purporting to be written by Pynchon himself The description was taken down prompting speculation over its authenticity but the blurb was soon back up along with the title of Pynchon s new novel Against the Day Shortly before Against the Day was published Pynchon s prose appeared in the program for The Daily Show Ten Fu ing Years The Concert a retrospective on Jon Stewart s comedy news broadcast The Daily Show 145 On December 6 2006 Pynchon joined a campaign by many other major authors to clear Ian McEwan of plagiarism charges by sending a typewritten letter to his British publisher which was published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper 146 Pynchon s 2009 YouTube promotional teaser for the novel Inherent Vice 147 is the second time a recording of his voice has been released to mainstream outlets the first being his appearances on The Simpsons 74 2010s edit In 2012 Pynchon s novels were released in e book format ending a long holdout by the author Publisher Penguin Press reported that the novels length and complex page layouts made it a challenge to convert them to a digital format Though they had produced a promotional video for the June release Penguin had no expectation Pynchon s public profile would change in any fashion 148 In 2013 his son Jackson Pynchon graduated from Columbia University where he was affiliated with St Anthony Hall 149 150 In September 2014 Josh Brolin told The New York Times that Pynchon had made a cameo in the Inherent Vice film adaptation This led to a sizable online hunt for the author s appearance eventually targeting actor Charley Morgan whose small role as a doctor led many to believe he was Pynchon Morgan son of M A S H s Harry Morgan claimed that Paul Thomas Anderson whom he described as a friend had told him that such a cameo did not exist Despite this nothing has been directly confirmed by Anderson or Warner Bros Pictures 151 152 On November 6 2018 Pynchon was photographed near his apartment in New York s Upper West Side district when he went to vote with his son The photo was published by the National Enquirer and was said to be the first photo of him in decades 153 2020s edit In December 2022 the Huntington Library announced that it had acquired the literary archive including typescripts and drafts of each of Pynchon s novels handwritten notes correspondence with publishers and research 154 Bibliography editMain article Thomas Pynchon bibliography V 1963 The Crying of Lot 49 1966 Gravity s Rainbow 1973 Slow Learner 1984 collection of previously published short stories Vineland 1990 Mason amp Dixon 1997 Against the Day 2006 Inherent Vice 2009 Bleeding Edge 2013 See also editPostmodern literature Hysterical realismReferences edit As pronounced by Pynchon himself Diatribe of a Mad Housewife The Simpsons Season 15 Episode 10 Fox Thomas Pynchon voiced by the real Thomas Pynchon Here s your quote Thomas Pynchon loved this book almost as much as he loves cameras Kachka Boris August 25 2013 On the Thomas Pynchon Trail From the Long Island of His Boyhood to the Yupper West Side of His New Novel New York Magazine Retrieved December 14 2022 Pynchon Dictionary com Archived from the original on January 20 2015 a b 1974 National Book Award winners National Book Foundation March 29 2012 Archived from the original on March 24 2019 With essays by Casey Hicks and Chad Post from the Awards 60 year anniversary blog The mock acceptance speech by Irwin Corey is not reprinted by NBF Krafft John M 2012 Biographical note In Dalsgaard Inger H Herman Luc McHale Brian eds The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon Cambridge University Press p 10 ISBN 978 0 521 76974 7 a b c Kachka Boris August 25 2013 On the Thomas Pynchon Trail From the Long Island of His Boyhood to the Yupper West Side of His New Novel Vulture Archived from the original on February 18 2020 Retrieved February 12 2020 His contributions to the Oyster High Purple amp Gold were first reprinted on pp 156 67 of Clifford Mead s Thomas Pynchon A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials Dalkey Archive Press 1989 Pynchon Thomas Voice of the Hamster The Modern Word Archived from the original on March 15 2013 Retrieved September 26 2014 Pynchon Thomas The Boys The Modern Word Archived from the original on March 15 2013 Retrieved September 26 2014 Pynchon Thomas Ye Legend of Sir Stupid and the Purple Knight The Modern Word Archived from the original on January 19 2013 Retrieved September 26 2014 National Archives National Personnel Records Center NPRC VIP list 2009 PDF National Personnel Records Center March 2008 Archived PDF from the original on November 27 2021 Retrieved October 19 2021 via GovernmentAttic org Cowart David 2011 Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History Athens Georgia University of Georgia Press p 3 ISBN 978 0 8203 3709 8 Krafft John M 2012 Chronology of Pynchon s Life and Works In Dalsgaard Inger H Herman Luc McHale Brian eds The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon Cambridge University Press pp x ISBN 978 0 521 76974 7 a b c Pynchon Thomas 1984 Slow Learner Little Brown and Company pp 8 32 ISBN 978 0 316 72442 5 McHale Brian 1981 Thomas Pychon A Portrait of the Artist as a Missing Person in Cencrastus No 5 Summer 1981 pp 2 7 ISSN 0264 0856 Krafft John M 2012 Biographical note In Dalsgaard Inger H Herman Luc McHale Brian eds The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon Cambridge University Press p 13 ISBN 978 0 521 76974 7 Archived from the original on February 7 2023 Retrieved February 7 2023 Pynchon Thomas 1983 Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me pp x xi Mimi amp Richard Farina Celebrations For A Grey Day Discogs 1965 Archived from the original on May 29 2023 Retrieved May 29 2023 Sweeney Susan Elizabeth June 25 2008 The V Shaped Paradigm Nabokov and Pynchon Cycnos 12 Archived from the original on July 19 2009 Thomas Pynchon on 9 11 American literature s greatest conspiracy The Independent September 20 2013 Archived from the original on May 7 2022 Retrieved February 12 2020 Gibbs Rodney 2004 A Portrait of the Luddite as a Young Man Denver Quarterly 39 1 Archived from the original on November 12 2006 Wisnicki Adrian 2000 A Trove of New Works by Thomas Pynchon Bomarc Service News Rediscovered Pynchon Notes 46 49 Spring 2000 National Book Awards 1964 Archived April 15 2021 at the Wayback Machine National Book Foundation Retrieved March 29 2012 Plimpton George April 23 1963 The Whole Sick Crew The New York Times Archived from the original on January 5 2023 Retrieved April 8 2023 Frost Garrison Thomas Pynchon and the South Bay The Aesthetic Archived from the original on March 6 2003 Retrieved September 26 2014 a b Royster Paul June 23 2005 Thomas Pynchon A Brief Chronology a href Template Cite journal html title Template Cite journal cite journal a Cite journal requires journal help Pynchon Thomas June 12 1966 A Journey into the Mind of Watts The New York Times Magazine Archived from the original on February 19 2006 A Gift of Books by Edward Albee Joseph Heller Alfred Kazin Thomas Pynchon Isaac Bashevis Singer and others Holiday December 1965 Archived from the original on April 4 2023 Retrieved April 17 2023 Writers and Editors War Tax Protest Names National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee Archived from the original on September 9 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Books A Myth of Alligators Time March 15 1963 a b c Gussow Mel March 4 1998 Pynchon s Letters Nudge His Mask The New York Times Archived from the original on August 19 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Johnson Ted April 20 1995 A Tour De Force From LAX Tower to Pulp Fiction Diner to Stars Hangouts Pop Culture Landmarks Dot Landscape Here Page 2 Los Angeles Times Archived from the original on December 4 2013 Retrieved August 21 2013 McLemee Scott You Hide They Seek Inside Higher Ed Archived from the original on April 3 2015 Retrieved September 26 2014 a b Kihss Peter May 8 1974 Pulitzer Jurors Dismayed on Pynchon The New York Times Archived from the original on July 31 2017 Retrieved September 19 2017 Awards Literature American Academy of Arts and Letters Archived from the original on January 14 2022 Retrieved January 14 2022 All TIME 100 Novels Time ISSN 0040 781X Retrieved April 9 2023 Plater William M 1978 Grim Phoenix Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon Indiana University Press ISBN 978 0 253 32670 6 a b Chambers Judith 1992 Thomas Pynchon Twayne Publishers ISBN 978 0 8057 3960 2 Fowler Douglas 1980 A Reader s Guide to Gravity s Rainbow Ardis Press ISBN 978 0 88233 405 9 a b Weisenburger Steven C 1988 A Gravity s Rainbow Companion Sources and Contexts for Pynchon s Novel University of Georgia Press ISBN 978 0 8203 1026 8 Ruch Allen Introduction to GR The Modern Word Archived from the original on September 15 2010 Retrieved September 26 2014 Almansi Guido 1994 L estetica dell osceno Piccola Biblioteca Einaudi p 226 McHale Brian 1987 Postmodernist Fiction New York Methuen p 16 ISBN 978 0 415 04513 1 Locke Richard March 11 1973 One of the Longest Most Difficult Most Ambitious Novels in Years The New York Times Archived from the original on April 16 2023 Retrieved April 16 2023 Pettman Dominic 2002 Thomas Pynchon In Bertens Hans Natoli Joseph eds Postmodernism The Key Figures Massachusetts Blackwell Publishers pp 261 266 ISBN 978 0 631 21796 1 Fiction Archived January 3 2016 at the Wayback Machine Past winners amp finalists by category The Pulitzer Prizes Retrieved March 29 2012 Slade Joseph W January 1982 Thomas Pynchon Postindustrial Humanist Technology and Culture 23 1 53 72 doi 10 2307 3104443 JSTOR 3104443 S2CID 146989742 All TIME 100 Best Novels Time ISSN 0040 781X Retrieved April 9 2023 Pynchon Thomas October 28 1984 Is It O K To Be A Luddite The New York Times Archived from the original on December 6 2016 Retrieved October 24 2016 Pynchon Thomas April 10 1988 The Heart s Eternal Vow The New York Times Archived from the original on April 24 2017 Retrieved February 13 2017 Pynchon Thomas June 6 1993 The Deadly Sins Sloth Nearer My Couch to Thee The New York Times Archived from the original on February 1 2017 Retrieved October 24 2016 Words for Salman Rushdie The New York Times March 12 1989 Archived from the original on April 4 2023 Retrieved April 4 2023 Cite news author last Salman Rushdie date January 14 1990 title Still Crazy After All These Years work The New York Times url https archive nytimes com www nytimes com books 97 05 18 reviews pynchon vineland html access date January 5 2023 archive date November 1 2022 archive url https web archive org web 20221101125235 https archive nytimes com www nytimes com books 97 05 18 reviews pynchon vineland html url status live Berressem Hanjo 1992 Pynchon s Poetics Interfacing Theory and Text Urbana and Chicago University of Illinois Press pp 236 7 ISBN 978 0 252 01919 7 Gray Paul October 18 1993 Rooms of Their Own Time Magazine Archived from the original on August 14 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Duvall John N ed 2002 Productive Postmodernism Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies Albany State University of New York Press p 76 ISBN 978 0 7914 5193 9 Rising Malin October 9 2008 Nobel literature Will an American win after all USA Today Archived from the original on September 23 2015 Retrieved September 26 2014 Blurbs From Thomas Pynchon www pynchon pomona edu Archived from the original on April 19 2023 Retrieved April 19 2023 Boyle T C May 18 1997 The Great Divide The New York Times Archived from the original on January 5 2023 Retrieved January 5 2023 a b Kakutani Michiko April 29 1997 Pynchon Hits the Road With Mason and Dixon The New York Times Archived from the original on March 20 2023 Retrieved March 20 2023 Bloom Harold 2003 Thomas Pynchon Chelsea House ISBN 978 0 7910 7030 7 Pierce Leonard June 15 2009 Harold Bloom on Blood Meridian The A V Club Archived from the original on November 5 2013 Retrieved August 27 2013 Bloom Harold September 24 2003 Dumbing down American readers The Boston Globe Archived from the original on March 20 2016 Retrieved September 23 2015 Kohn Marek June 4 2010 Book Of A Lifetime Mason amp Dixon By Thomas Pynchon The Independent Archived from the original on April 25 2023 Retrieved April 25 2023 Makowsky Johann A 2020 Modernism Fiction and Mathematics Notices of the American Mathematical Society 67 10 1593 doi 10 1090 noti2170 S2CID 196470810 the latter contains a lot of mathematical material pertaining to Sofia Kovalevskaya and to Hilbert s school in Gottingen Pynchon seemingly researched this material with the help of Michael Naumann Patterson Troy July 19 2006 The Pynchon Post Slate Archived from the original on September 14 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Italie Hillel July 20 2006 New Thomas Pynchon Novel is on the way Associated Press Leith Sam December 1 2006 Pinning down Pynchon The Guardian Archived from the original on September 28 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Wood Michael January 4 2007 Humming along London Review of Books Vol 29 no 1 Archived from the original on October 3 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Sante Luc January 11 2007 Inside the Time Machine The New York Review of Books Archived from the original on April 2 2015 Retrieved September 26 2014 Kirsch Adam November 15 2006 Pynchon He Who Lives By the List Dies by It The New York Sun Archived from the original on October 18 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Miller Laura November 21 2006 The fall of the house of Pynchon Salon com Archived from the original on October 17 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Reynolds Nigel December 6 2006 Recluse speaks out to defend McEwan The Telegraph Archived from the original on February 27 2018 Retrieved April 4 2018 a b Kurutz Steven August 11 2009 Yup It s Him A Pynchon Mystery Solved The Wall Street Journal Archived from the original on February 2 2015 Retrieved September 26 2014 Alden William February 25 2013 Pynchon Takes On Silicon Alley DealBook The New York Times Archived from the original on July 7 2013 Retrieved August 21 2013 Sissman L E May 19 1973 Hieronymus and Robert Bosch The Art of Thomas Pynchon The New Yorker Lane Anthony May 12 1997 Then Voyager The New Yorker Postmodernism postmodernblog tumblr com Archived from the original on December 20 2013 Retrieved August 21 2013 Dalsgaard Inger H Herman Luc McHale Brian eds 2011 Pynchon s postmodernism University Publishing Online doi 10 1017 CCOL9780521769747 ISBN 9780521769747 Archived from the original on December 19 2013 Retrieved August 21 2013 Rosenthal Regine November 1989 Gravity s Rainbow and the postmodern picaro Revue francaise d etudes americaines 42 42 407 426 doi 10 3406 rfea 1989 1376 JSTOR 20872015 Gordon Andrew 1994 The Vineland Papers Moore Thomas 1987 The Style of Connectedness Gravity s Rainbow and Thomas Pynchon University of Missouri Press ISBN 978 0826206251 Cowart David 1990 Attenuated Postmodernism Pynchon s Vineland Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction 32 2 67 76 doi 10 1080 00111619 1990 9933800 Archived from the original on June 13 2021 Retrieved June 13 2021 CD Album Spike Jones Spiked Archived April 20 2022 at the Wayback Machine at 45Worlds Sales Nancy November 11 1996 Meet Your Neighbor Thomas Pynchon New York Retrieved May 31 2017 Gazi Jordan 2014 On Deleuze and Guattari s Italian Wedding Fake Book Pynchon Improvisation Social Organisation and Assemblage Orbit A Journal of American Literature 4 2 Archived from the original on June 14 2021 Retrieved June 14 2021 Logan William 1998 Pynchon in the Poetic Southwest Review 83 4 424 37 JSTOR 43471943 Archived from the original on June 13 2021 Retrieved June 13 2021 Fahey Joseph 1977 Thomas Pynchon s V and Mythology Critique Studies in Contemporary Fiction 18 3 5 18 doi 10 1080 00111619 1977 10690141 Archived from the original on April 4 2023 Retrieved June 14 2021 Safer Elaine M 1983 John O Stark Pynchon s Fictions Thomas Pynchon and the Literature of Information Book Review The Yearbook of English Studies 13 356 doi 10 2307 3508174 JSTOR 3508174 Archived from the original on June 14 2021 Retrieved June 14 2021 a b McClure John A 2007 Partial Faiths Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison University of Georgia Press p 38 ISBN 978 0 8203 3660 2 JSTOR j ctt46n5bh Archived from the original on June 14 2021 Retrieved June 14 2021 Smith Jared 2014 All Maps Were Useless Resisting Genre and Recovering Spirituality in Pynchon s Against the Day Orbit A Journal of American Literature 2 2 Archived from the original on June 14 2021 Retrieved June 14 2021 a b c Mendelson Edward 1976 Encyclopedic Narrative From Dante to Pynchon MLN Comparative Literature 91 6 1267 75 doi 10 2307 2907136 JSTOR 2907136 Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Donoghue William 2014 Mannerist Fiction Pathologies of Space from Rabelais to Pynchon University of Toronto Press ISBN 978 1 4426 4801 2 Archived from the original on December 4 2020 Retrieved June 20 2021 Holdsworth Carole 1988 Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon Cervantes Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 8 1 47 53 doi 10 3138 cervantes 8 1 047 S2CID 190326661 Archived from the original on June 21 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Battestin M C 1997 Review Pynchon North and South Sewanee Review 105 3 lxxvi lxxviii JSTOR 27548359 Archived from the original on June 25 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Stonehill Brian 1988 The Self Conscious Novel Artifice in Fiction from Joyce to Pynchon University of Pennsylvania Press ISBN 978 1 5128 0732 5 JSTOR j ctv4rfsgd Archived from the original on June 25 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Lenz William E 1991 Poe s Arthur Gordon Pym and the Narrative Techniques of Antarctic Gothic CEA Critic 53 3 30 8 JSTOR 44377065 Archived from the original on June 25 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Hashhozheva Galena 2008 The Mittelwerke Site Para site Non site Pynchon Notes 54 5 137 53 Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Min Hye Sook 2003 The Pyncheons of The House of the Seven Gables Questing after Thomas Pynchon Journal of English and American Studies 2 121 33 Madsen Deborah Lea 2008 Pynchon and the Tradition of American Romance In Schaub T H ed Approaches to Teaching Thomas Pynchon sThe Crying of Lot 49and Other Works Modern Language Association New York pp 25 30 Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Palmeri Frank 2012 Satire in Narrative Petronius Swift Gibbon Melville amp Pynchon University of Texas Press ISBN 978 0292741508 Poirier Richard 1975 The Importance of Thomas Pynchon Twentieth Century Literature 21 2 151 62 doi 10 2307 440705 JSTOR 440705 Archived from the original on June 25 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Logan William 2009 Pynchon in the Poetic Our Savage Art Poetry and the Civil Tongue Columbia University Press pp 221 33 doi 10 7312 loga14732 022 ISBN 9780231147323 Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Green Martin 1982 The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon s Heart of Darkness Pynchon Notes 8 30 8 doi 10 16995 pn 458 Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Cooley Ronald W 1993 The Hothouse or the Street Imperialism and Narrative in Pynchon s V Modern Fiction Studies 39 2 307 25 doi 10 1353 mfs 0 0354 JSTOR 26284217 S2CID 162401378 Archived from the original on June 25 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Smith Evans Lansing 1990 The Arthurian Underworld of Modernism Thomas Mann Thomas Pynchon Robertson Davies Arthurian Interpretations 4 2 50 64 JSTOR 27868683 Archived from the original on June 25 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Spiridon Monica 2013 Holy Sinners Narrative Betrayal and Thematic Machination in Thomas Mann s and Thomas Pynchon s novels Neohelicon 40 199 208 doi 10 1007 s11059 013 0174 0 S2CID 161974352 Archived from the original on June 30 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Hume Kathryn 2000 Books of the Dead Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer Burroughs Acker and Pynchon Modern Philology 97 3 417 44 doi 10 1086 492868 S2CID 153989943 Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 a b Cooper Peter L 1983 Signs and Symptoms Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World University of California Press ISBN 978 0520045378 Witzling David 2008 Everybody s America Thomas Pynchon Race and the Cultures of Postmodernism Routledge doi 10 4324 9780203479681 ISBN 9780203479681 Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 a b Hospital Janette Turner 1995 Collected Stories 1970 To 1995 pp 361 2 Burdett Lorraine 2001 Synthetics Surveillance and Sarsaparilla Patrick White and the New Gossip Economy Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Special conference issue Australian Literature in a Global World edited by Wenche Ommundsen and Tony Simoes da Silva Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Schell Robert 2014 Engaging Foundational Narratives in Morrison s Paradise and Pynchon s Mason amp Dixon College Literature 41 3 69 94 doi 10 1353 lit 2014 0029 JSTOR 24544601 S2CID 143028097 Archived from the original on June 24 2021 Retrieved June 20 2021 Peirce Carol Marshall 1982 Pynchon s V and Durrell s Alexandria Quartet A Seminar in the Modern Tradition Pynchon Notes 8 23 29 Porush David 1994 The Hacker We Call God Transcendent Writing Machines in Kafka and Pynchon Pynchon Notes 34 35 129 47 a b Tanner Tony 1982 Thomas Pynchon Methuen p 18 ISBN 978 0 416 31670 4 Brook Thomas 1983 What s the Point On Comparing Joyce and Pynchon Pynchon Notes 11 44 48 A literary recluse The mystery of Pynchon The Independent August 17 2006 Archived from the original on May 7 2022 Retrieved January 24 2018 The Lush Life of William T Vollmann Newsweek November 6 2013 Archived from the original on January 24 2018 Retrieved January 24 2018 Nazaryan Alexander May 19 2017 A Personal Foray Into the Long Lost Pynchon Tapes The New York Times ISSN 0362 4331 Archived from the original on January 24 2018 Retrieved January 24 2018 Guardian October 7 2015 William Gibson I Was Losing A Sense of How weird the real world was The Guardian A for Alan Moore Mousse Magazine and Publishing December 2013 Archived from the original on March 20 2020 Retrieved March 20 2020 TOILET BOWLS IN GRAVITY S RAINBOW Tommaso Pincio Post in Italian February 24 2013 Archived from the original on January 25 2018 Retrieved January 24 2018 Anders Charlie Jane A new crop of literary novels explores our internet dystopia io9 Archived from the original on January 24 2018 Retrieved January 24 2018 The Believer The Romantic Fabulist Predicts a Dreamy Apocalypse The Believer June 1 2003 Archived from the original on January 24 2018 Retrieved January 24 2018 Page Adrian 2002 Towards a poetics of hypertext fiction In Bissell Elizabeth B ed The Question of Literature The Place on the Literary in Contemporary Theory Manchester University Press ISBN 978 0 7190 5744 1 Ranin Ian November 26 2006 Reader Beware The Guardian Archived from the original on April 4 2023 Retrieved April 4 2023 Guido Ernesto Asteroids named after Thomas Pynchon amp Stabia Archived from the original on July 14 2014 Retrieved June 11 2014 Plimpton George April 21 1963 Mata Hari with a Clockwork Eye Alligators in the Sewer PDF The New York Times Archived PDF from the original on October 14 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Corey Irwin Transcript of Remarks Given at the National Book Awards Thursday April 18 1974 Archived from the original on December 24 2013 Retrieved October 17 2013 Batchelor J C April 22 1976 Thomas Pynchon is not Thomas Pynchon or This is End of the Plot Which Has No Name SoHo Weekly News A SoHo Weekly News Who s Who by Allan Wolper https sohomemory org a soho weekly news whos who Archived March 22 2023 at the Wayback Machine Siegel Jules March 1977 Who is Thomas Pynchon and why did he take off with my wife Playboy Salm Arthur February 8 2004 A Screaming Comes Across the Sky but Not a Photo San Diego Union Tribune Pynchon Thomas March 12 1989 Words for Salman Rushdie The New York Times Book Review Boog Jason July 17 2009 Salman Rushdie s Dinner with Thomas Pynchon GalleyCat Mediabistro com Archived from the original on July 15 2012 Retrieved August 13 2012 Cohen Joshua October 1 2013 Review First Family Second Life by Joshua Cohen Harper s Magazine Vol October 2013 Archived from the original on September 27 2020 Retrieved August 13 2020 a b Where s Thomas Pynchon CNN Archived from the original on December 3 2014 Retrieved September 26 2014 Bone James June 7 1998 Who the hell is he Sunday Times South Africa Glenn Joshua October 19 2003 Pynchon and Homer The Boston Globe Archived from the original on March 4 2016 Retrieved September 26 2014 Pappademas Alex September 25 2013 Purple Drank Britney and The Rachel The Weird But Logical Pop Culture Obsessions of Thomas Pynchon s Bleeding Edge Grantland Archived from the original on October 28 2020 Retrieved September 9 2020 Kipen David May 8 1994 Brevity s Raincheck Los Angeles Times Archived from the original on October 28 2020 Retrieved September 9 2020 Glazek Christopher August 10 2009 The Pynchon Hoax The New Yorker Warner Simon August 2 2001 A king a queen and two knaves An Interview with David Hadju sic PopMatters Archived from the original on March 4 2016 Retrieved September 26 2014 The Wanda Tinasky Affair thinkinthemorning com October 8 2016 Archived from the original on December 27 2022 Retrieved December 28 2022 Foster Don 2000 Author Unknown On the Trail of Anonymous Pynchon References on TV themodernword com Archived from the original on November 30 2010 Retrieved December 10 2010 Ketzan Eric Literary Titan Thomas Pynchon Breaks 40 Year Silence on The Simpsons themodernword com Archived from the original on March 11 2011 Retrieved December 10 2010 Krumboltz Mike September 4 2014 Thomas Pynchon Draws the Line at Making Fun of Homer Simpson s Big Butt Yahoo TV Archived from the original on September 5 2014 Retrieved September 5 2014 Selman Matt Matt Selman Matt Selman s Twitter Account Twitter Archived from the original on September 2 2014 Retrieved September 5 2014 The fax sent to us by Thomas Pynchon with his jokes written on the script page Orwell George 2003 Nineteen Eighty Four New York Plume Harcourt amp Brace ISBN 978 0 452 28423 4 Pynchon References on TV themodernword com Archived from the original on November 30 2010 Retrieved December 10 2010 Reynolds Nigel December 6 2006 Recluse speaks out to defend McEwan The Telegraph Archived from the original on January 12 2022 Retrieved September 26 2014 Inherent Vice Thomas Pynchon YouTube Penguin Books USA Archived from the original on December 31 2022 Retrieved December 31 2022 Bosman Julie June 12 2012 After Long Resistance Pynchon Allows Novels to Be Sold as E Books The New York Times Media Decoder blog Archived from the original on June 17 2012 Retrieved June 17 2012 Phillips Kaitlin February 28 2013 The Not So Secret Society Columbia Daily Spectator Archived from the original on January 26 2021 Retrieved August 13 2020 Trotter J K June 17 2013 Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York Where He s Always Been The Atlantic Archived from the original on November 11 2020 Retrieved August 13 2020 Hendrickson John January 22 2015 We re Still Trying to Find the Thomas Pynchon Inherent Vice Cameo Esquire Archived from the original on November 17 2016 Retrieved November 16 2016 Daly Kyle June 4 2015 Maybe Thomas Pynchon wasn t in Inherent Vice after all The A V Club Archived from the original on November 16 2016 Retrieved November 16 2016 Fernandez Laura January 18 2019 Cazar a Pynchon El Pais in Spanish ISSN 1134 6582 Archived from the original on August 4 2019 Retrieved June 24 2023 The Huntington Acquires Thomas Pynchon Archive Huntington Library December 14 2022 Archived from the original on December 14 2022 Retrieved June 24 2023 Further reading editKharpertian Theodore D Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern American Satire pp 20 2 in Kharpertian A Hand to Turn the Time The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon McHale Brian 1981 Thomas Pychon A Portrait of the Artist as a Missing Person Cencrastus No 5 Summer 1981 pp 2 7 ISSN 0264 0856 Stevenson Randall 1983 Review of The Small Rain Cencrastus No 11 New Year 1983 pp 40 amp 41 ISSN 0264 0856External links editListen to this article 2 parts 31 minutes source source source source nbsp These audio files were created from a revision of this article dated 16 March 2006 2006 03 16 and do not reflect subsequent edits Audio help More spoken articles nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Thomas Pynchon The following links were last verified on May 31 2017 Inherent Vice Diagrammed A reader s guide to Pynchon s novel Inherent Vice with diagrams showing all the character relationships a character relationship index and chapter and plot summaries Works by or about Thomas Pynchon at Internet Archive Thomas Pynchon at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database nbsp Thomas Pynchon ThomasPynchon com The Thomas Pynchon Wiki Pynchon Notes a journal operated from 1979 and 2009 by the Miami University in Oxford Ohio archived by the Open Library of Humanities Pynchon in Public Podcast a podcast going through each of Pynchon s novels one episode at a time Spermatikos Logos Thomas Pynchon on The Modern Word Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Thomas Pynchon amp oldid 1220797912, 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