Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American writer based in
New York City, noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island,
Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from
Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
he began composing the novels for which he is best known today: V. (1963), The Crying of
Lot 49 (1966), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and
Against the Day (2006).
Pynchon is regarded by many readers and critics as one of the finest contemporary
authors. Both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter,
styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and
mathematics. Pynchon is also known for his avoidance of personal publicity: very few
photographs of him have ever been published, and rumours about his location and identity
have been circulated since the 1960s

Childhood and education

Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School, where he was awarded "student of the
year" and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper (Pynchon 1952-3).
These juvenilia incorporated some of the literary motifs and recurring subject matter he
would use throughout his career: oddball names, sophomoric humour, illicit drug use and
paranoia.
After graduating from high school in 1953 at the age of 16, Pynchon studied
engineering physics at Cornell University, but left at the end of his second year to serve in
the U.S. Navy. In 1957, he returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. His first
published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in the Cornell Writer in May 1959, and
narrates an actual experience of a friend who had served in the army; subsequently,
however, episodes and characters throughout Pynchon's fiction draw freely upon his own
experiences in the navy.
While at Cornell, Pynchon started his life-long friendship with Richard Faria;
Pynchon would go on to dedicate "Gravity's Rainbow" to Faria, as well as serve as his
best man and as his pallbearer. Together the two briefly led what Pynchon has called a
"micro-cult" around Oakley Hall's 1958 novel Warlock.
After leaving Cornell, Pynchon began to work on his first novel. From February 1960
to September 1962, he was employed as a technical writer at Boeing in Seattle, where he
compiled safety articles for the Bomarc Service News (see Wisnicki 2000-1), a support
newsletter for the BOMARC surface-to-air missile deployed by the U.S. Air Force.
Pynchon's experiences at Boeing inspired his depictions of the "Yoyodyne" corporation in

V. and The Crying of Lot 49, and both his background in physics and the technical
journalism he undertook at Boeing provided much raw material for Gravity's Rainbow.
When it was published in 1963, Pynchon's novel V. won a William Faulkner Foundation
Award for best first novel of the year.

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."
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 unknown,
but in a 1965 letter to Donadio, Pynchon had written that he was in the middle of writing a
book that he called a "potboiler."
The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award shortly
after publication. Although more concise and linear in its structure than Pynchon's other
novels, its labyrinthine plot features an ancient, underground mail service known as "The
Tristero" or "Trystero," a parody of a Jacobean revenge drama entitled "The Courier's
Tragedy," and a corporate conspiracy involving the bones of World War II American GIs
being used as charcoal cigarette filters. It proposes a series of seemingly incredible
interconnections between these and other similarly bizarre revelations that confront the
novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas. Like V., the novel contains a wealth of references to
science and technology and to obscure historical events, and both books dwell upon the
detritus of American society and culture. The Crying of Lot 49 also continues Pynchon's
habit of composing parodic song lyrics and punning names, and referencing aspects of
popular culture within his prose narrative. In particular, it incorporates a very direct allusion
to the protagonist of Nabokov's Lolita within the lyric of a love lament sung by a member of
'The Paranoids', a teenage band who deliberately sing their songs with British accents.
In 1968, Pynchon was one of 447 signatories to the "Writers and Editors War Tax
Protest." Full-page advertisements in The New York Post and The New York Review of
Books listed the names of those who had pledged not to pay "the proposed 10% income
tax surcharge or any war-designated tax increase," and stated their belief "that American
involvement in Vietnam is morally wrong" (New York Review of Books 1968:9).

Themes
Along with its emphasis on loftier themes such as racism, imperialism and religion,
and its cognizance and appropriation of many elements of traditional high culture and
literary form, Pynchon's work also demonstrates a strong affinity with the practitioners and

artifacts of low culture, including comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films,
television programs, cookery, urban myths, conspiracy theories, and folk art. This blurring
of the conventional boundary between "High" and "low" culture, sometimes interpreted as a
"deconstruction", is seen as one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism.
In particular, Pynchon has revealed himself in his fiction and non-fiction as an
aficionado of popular music. Song lyrics and mock musical numbers appear in each of his
novels, and, in his autobiographical introduction to the Slow Learner collection of early
stories, he reveals a fondness for both jazz and rock and roll. The character McClintic
Sphere in V. is a fictional composite of jazz musicians such as Ornette Coleman, Charlie
Parker and Thelonious Monk. In The Crying of Lot 49, the lead singer of "The Paranoids"
sports "a Beatle haircut" and sings with an English accent. In the closing pages of Gravity's
Rainbow, there is an apocryphal report that Tyrone Slothrop, the novel's protagonist,
played kazoo and harmonica as a guest musician on a record released by The Fool in the
1960s (having magically recovered the latter instrument, his "harp", in a German stream in
1945, after losing it down the toilet in 1939 at the Roseland Ballroom in Roxbury, Boston,
to the strains of the jazz standard 'Cherokee', upon which tune Charlie Parker was
simultaneously inventing bebop in New York, as Pynchon describes). In Vineland, both
Zoyd Wheeler and Isaiah Two Four are also musicians: Zoyd played keyboards in a '60s
surf band called "The Corvairs", while Isaiah played in a punk band called "Billy Barf and
the Vomitones". In Mason & Dixon, one of the characters plays on the "Clavier" the varsity
drinking song which will later become "The Star-Spangled Banner"; whilst in another
episode a character remarks tangentially "Sometimes, it's hard to be a woman".
In his Slow Learner introduction, Pynchon acknowledges a debt to the anarchic
bandleader Spike Jones, and in 1994, he penned a 3000-word set of liner notes for the
album Spiked!, a collection of Jones's recordings released on the short-lived BMG Catalyst
label. Pynchon also wrote the liner notes for Nobody's Cool, the second album of indie rock
band Lotion, in which he states that "rock and roll remains one of the last honorable
callings, and a working band is a miracle of everyday life. Which is basically what these
guys do." He is also known to be a fan of Roky Erickson.
Investigations and digressions into the realms of human sexuality, psychology,
sociology, mathematics, science, and technology recur throughout Pynchon's works. One
of his earliest short stories, "Low-lands" (1960), features a meditation on Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle as a metaphor for telling stories about one's own experiences. His
next published work, "Entropy" (1960), introduced the concept which was to become
synonymous with Pynchon's name (though Pynchon later admitted the "shallowness of
[his] understanding" of the subject, and noted that choosing an abstract concept first and
trying to construct a narrative around it was "a lousy way to go about writing a story").
Another early story, "Under the Rose" (1961), includes amongst its cast of characters a

cyborg set anachronistically in Victorian-era Egypt (a type of writing now called

steampunk). This story, significantly reworked by Pynchon, appears as Chapter 3 of V.
"The Secret Integration" (1964), Pynchon's last published short story, is a sensitivelyhandled 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 sadomasochism, coprophilia and a borderline case of tentacle rape), and features numerous
episodes of drug use, most notably marijuana but also cocaine, naturally occurring
hallucinogens, and the mushroom Amanita muscaria. Gravity's Rainbow also derives much
from Pynchon's background in mathematics: at one point, the geometry of garter belts is
compared with that of cathedral spires, both described as mathematical singularities.
Mason & Dixon explores the scientific, theological, and socio-cultural foundations of the
Age of Reason whilst also depicting the relationships between actual historical figures and
fictional characters in intricate detail and, like Gravity's Rainbow, is an archetypal example
of the genre of historiographic metafiction.

Influence
An eclectic catalogue of Pynchonian precursors has been proposed by readers and
critics. Beside overt references in the novels to writers as disparate as Henry Adams,
Giorgio de Chirico, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Emily Dickinson, William March, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Jorge Luis Borges, Ishmael Reed, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Patrick O'Brian, and
Umberto Eco and to an eclectic mix of iconic religious and philosophical sources, credible
comparisons with works by Rabelais, Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Edgar Allan Poe,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann,
William Burroughs, Ralph Ellison, Patrick White, and Toni Morrison have been made.
Some commentators have detected similarities with those writers in the Modernist tradition
who wrote extremely long novels dealing with large metaphysical or political issues.
Examples of such works might include Ulysses by James Joyce, A Passage to India by
E.M. Forster, The Castle by Franz Kafka, The Apes of God by Wyndham Lewis, The Man
Without Qualities by Robert Musil, and U.S.A. by John Dos Passos. In his 'Introduction' to
Slow Learner, Pynchon explicitly acknowledges his debt to Beat Generation writers, and
expresses his admiration for Jack Kerouac's On the Road in particular; he also reveals his
familiarity with literary works by T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Saul Bellow,

Herbert Gold, Philip Roth and Norman Mailer, and non-fiction works by Helen Waddell,
Norbert Wiener and Isaac Asimov. Other contemporary American authors whose fiction is
often categorized alongside Pynchon's include John Hawkes, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph
Heller, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, and Joseph McElroy.
The wildly eccentric characters, frenzied action, frequent digressions, and imposing
lengths of Pynchon's novels have led critic James Wood to classify Pynchon's work as
hysterical realism. Other writers whose work has been labeled as hysterical realism include
Salman Rushdie, Steve Erickson, Neal Stephenson, and Zadie Smith. Younger
contemporary writers who have been touted as heirs apparent to Pynchon include David
Foster Wallace, William Vollmann, Richard Powers, Steve Erickson, David Mitchell, Neal
Stephenson, Dave Eggers, and Tommaso Pincio whose pseudonym is an Italian rendering
of Pynchon's name.
Pynchon's work has been cited as an influence and inspiration by many writers and
artists, including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Alan Cabal, Don DeLillo, Ian Rankin, William
Gibson, Elfriede Jelinek, Rick Moody, Alan Moore, Arturo Prez-Reverte, Richard Powers,
Salman Rushdie, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Jan Wildt, Laurie Anderson, Zak Smith,
David Cronenberg, and Adam Rapp. Thanks to his influence on Gibson and Stephenson in
particular, Pynchon became one of the progenitors of cyberpunk fiction. Though the term
"cyberpunk" did not become prevalent until the early 1980s, many readers retroactively
include Gravity's Rainbow in the genre, along with other works e.g., Samuel R. Delany's
Dhalgren and many works of Philip K. Dick which seem, after the fact, to anticipate
cyberpunk styles and themes. The encyclopedic nature of Pynchon's novels also led to
some attempts to link his work with the short-lived hypertext fiction movement of the 1990s
(Page 2002; Krmer 2005).