Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. (/ˈpɪntʃɒn/PIN-chon,[1][2]commonly/ˈpɪntʃən/PIN-chən;[3] born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist. He is noted for his complex works ofpostmodern fiction, characterized by dense references topopular culture, history, literature, music, science, and mathematics, as well as by humor and explorations ofparanoia. He is widely regarded as one of the greatestAmerican novelists. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive. Few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
Pynchon, aged 16, in his high school senior portrait
Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937, inGlen 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. As a child, Pynchon alternately attended anEpiscopal church with his father and aCatholic church with his mother.[6]
A "voracious reader and precocious writer", Pynchon is believed to haveskipped two grades before high school.[6] He attendedOyster Bay High School inOyster Bay, where he was named "student of the year" and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper. Thesejuvenilia incorporated some of the literary motifs and subject matter he has used throughout his career: oddball names, sophomoric humor, illicit drug use, and paranoia.[7][8][9][10]
During his time as a US Navy sailor, Pynchon is believed to have served aboard theUSSHank during theSuez Crisis.
In 1957, Pynchon returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. His first published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in theCornell Writer in March 1959, and narrates an actual experience of a friend who had served in theArmy. Pynchon's later fiction draws freely upon his experiences in the Navy.[14] His short story "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" was published in the Spring 1959 issue ofEpoch magazine.[15]
While at Cornell, Pynchon befriendedRichard Fariña,Kirkpatrick Sale, andDavid Shetzline.[16] Pynchon dedicatedGravity's Rainbow to Fariña, and served as his best man and his pallbearer. In Pynchon's introduction to Fariña's novelBeen Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, he writes, "we also succeeded in getting on the same literary wavelength. We showed up once at a party, not a masquerade party, in disguise—he asHemingway, I asScott 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'sWarlock. 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 inWarlock dialogue, a kind of thoughtful, stylized, Victorian-Wild West diction."[17] Pynchon reportedly attended lectures byVladimir Nabokov, who at the time taught literature at Cornell. Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon, but Nabokov's wifeVéra, who graded her husband's class papers, said she remembered his distinctive handwriting as a mixture of printed andcursive letters, "half printing, half script".[18][19] In 1958, Pynchon and Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical,Minstrel Island, which portrays a dystopian future in whichIBM rules the world.[20] Pynchon received hisB.A. with distinction as a member ofPhi Beta Kappa in June 1959.
George Plimpton gave the book a positive review inThe New York Times, calling it apicaresque 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".[23]
Time's review ofV. 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?"[24].
Pynchon created the "muted post horn" as a symbol for the secret "Trystero" society inThe Crying of Lot 49.
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 a small downstairs apartment at 217 33rd St. in Manhattan Beach[25][26] where he lived as he was composing what becameGravity's Rainbow.
In an April 1964 letter to his agent, Candida Donadio, Pynchon wrote that he had 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."[28]
From the mid-1960s Pynchon regularly providedblurbs and introductions for a wide range of novels and nonfiction works. He contributed an appreciation ofOakley Hall'sWarlock in a feature called "A Gift of Books" in the December 1965 issue ofHoliday. Pynchon wrote that Hall "has restored to the myth ofTombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity ... It is this deep sensitivity to abysses that makesWarlock, 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."[29]
In December 1965, Pynchon politely turned down an invitation fromStanley Edgar Hyman to teach literature atBennington 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 said he was "too stubborn to let any of them go, let alone all of them."[30]
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."[28]
The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award shortly after publication.[31][32] 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 aJacobean revenge drama calledThe Courier's Tragedy, and a corporate conspiracy involving the bones ofWorld War II AmericanGIs being used as charcoalcigarette filters. It proposes a series of seemingly incredible connections between these events and other similarly bizarre revelations that confront the novel's protagonist, Oedipa Maas. LikeV., the novel contains a wealth of references to science, technology, and obscure historical events.The Crying of Lot 49 also continues Pynchon's habits of writing satiric song lyrics and referencingpopular culture. An example of both can be seen inallusion to the narrator of Nabokov'sLolita 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 withGravity's Rainbow andMason & Dixon. It was included onTime'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".[33]
In June 1966, Pynchon wrote "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts", a firsthand report on the aftermath and legacy of theWatts Riots in Los Angeles published inThe New York Times Magazine.[34]
Pynchon retrospectively found that thehippie movement, both in the form of the Beats of the 1950s and the resurgence form of the 1960s, "placed too much emphasis on youth, including the eternal variety."[14]
In 1968, Pynchon was one of 447 signatories to the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest". Full-page advertisements in theNew York Post andThe 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".[35]
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, includingpreterition,paranoia,racism,colonialism,conspiracy,synchronicity, andentropy,[36][37] it has generated a wealth of commentary and critical material, including reader's guides,[38][39] books and scholarly articles, online concordances and discussions, and art works. Its artistic value is often compared to that ofJames Joyce'sUlysses.[40] Some scholars have called it the greatest American post-World War II novel,[41] and it has similarly been described as "literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices".[42]Richard Locke, reviewing it inThe New York Times, wrote,"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 sinceNabokov'sAda four years ago; its technical and verbal resources bring to mindMelville andFaulkner."[43]
The major portion ofGravity's Rainbow takes place in Europe in the final months ofWorld War II and the weeks immediately followingV-E 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 ofdramatic irony whereby neither the characters nor the variousnarrative voices are aware of specific historical circumstances, such as theHolocaust 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". 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.[44]
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 that his own family "made its money killing trees", he apostrophizes his apology and plea for advice to thecoppice within which he has momentarily taken refuge. In an overt incitement toeco-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.'"
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 ofpsychology,chemistry,mathematics,history,religion,music,literature, human sexuality, andfilm. Pynchon wrote the first draft in "neat, tiny script on engineer'squadrille paper".[39] He worked on the novel throughout the 1960s and early 1970s while living in California and Mexico City.
Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1974National Book Award withA Crown of Feathers and Other Stories byIsaac Bashevis Singer (split award).[4] That same year, thePulitzer Prize For Fiction panel unanimously recommendedGravity's Rainbow for the award, but the Pulitzer board vetoed the recommendation, calling the novel "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in parts "obscene".[31] No Pulitzer Prize For Fiction was awarded that year and finalists were not recognized before 1980.[45] In 1975, Pynchon declined theWilliam Dean Howells Medal.[46] Along withLot 49,Gravity's Rainbow was included onTime's list of the 100 greatest English-language novels published since the magazine's founding, withLev 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."[47]
His earliest American ancestor,William Pynchon, emigrated to theMassachusetts Bay Colony with theWinthrop Fleet in 1630, then became the founder ofSpringfield, Massachusetts, in 1636. Thereafter a long line of Pynchon descendants found wealth and repute on American soil. Deborah Madsen argues that Pynchon's ancestry and family background have partially inspired his fiction, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in the short story "The Secret Integration" (1964) andGravity's Rainbow.[48]
A collection of Pynchon's early short stories,Slow Learner, was published in 1984, with a lengthyautobiographical introduction. In October of that year, an article titled "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" was published inThe New York Times Book Review.[49] In April 1988, Pynchon reviewedGabriel García Márquez'sLove in the Time of Cholera inThe New York Times, calling it "a shining and heartbreaking book".[50] Another article, "Nearer, My Couch, to Thee", was published in June 1993 inThe New York Times Book Review, as one in a series of articles in which various writers reflected on each of theSeven Deadly Sins. Pynchon's subject was "Sloth".[51] In 1989, Pynchon was one of many authors who signed a letter of solidarity withSalman Rushdie after Rushdie was sentenced to death by theAyatollah for his novelThe Satanic Verses. Pynchon wrote: "I pray that tolerance and respect for life prevail. I keep thinking of you."[52]
Pynchon's fourth novel,Vineland, was published in 1990 and disappointed some fans and critics. But it received a favorable review from 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, likePaul 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 anFBICOINTELPRO agent and a radical filmmaker. Its strong sociopolitical undercurrents detail the battle betweenauthoritarianism andcommunalism and the nexus betweenresistance and complicity, but with a typically Pynchonian sense of humor.[54]
In 1988, he received aMacArthur Fellowship and, since the early 1990s at least, he has been frequently cited as a contender for theNobel Prize in Literature.[55][56][57] Pynchon provided a blurb forDon DeLillo's novelMao II, about a reclusive novelist and partly inspired by thefatwa on 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]
The meticulously researched novel is a sprawlingpostmodernist saga recounting the lives and careers of the English astronomerCharles Mason and his partner, the surveyorJeremiah Dixon, whose survey of the American West resulted in theMason–Dixon line, during the birth of theAmerican Republic. The dust jacket notes that it features appearances byGeorge 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 criticHarold 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 withCormac McCarthy,Philip Roth, andDon DeLillo.[62][63] ForThe Independent feature Book Of A Lifetime,Marek Kohn choseMason & 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]
Various rumors about the subject matter ofAgainst the Day circulated for years. Most specific of these were comments made by the former German minister of cultureMichael Naumann, who said he assisted Pynchon in his research about "a Russian mathematician [who] studied forDavid Hilbert inGöttingen", and that the new novel would trace the life and loves ofSofia Kovalevskaya.[65]
In July 2006, a new, untitled novel by Pynchon was announced along with a description by Pynchon: "Spanning the period between theChicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just afterWorld War I, this novel moves from thelabor 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 mysteriousTunguska 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 byNikola Tesla,Bela Lugosi, andGroucho Marx, as well as "stupid songs" and "strange sexual practices". Subsequently, the title of the new book was reported to beAgainst 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 to review it. 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 calledAgainst the Day "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 defendingIan McEwan against charges of plagiarism in his novelAtonement: "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]
A synopsis and brief extract from the novel, along with its title and dust jacket image, were printed in Penguin Press's 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 acannabis haze to watch the end of an era asfree love slips away andparanoia 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.[74] A 2014 film adaptation of thesame name was directed byPaul Thomas Anderson.
Bleeding Edge takes place in Manhattan'sSilicon Alley during "the lull between the collapse of the dot-com boom and the terrible events ofSeptember 11". The novel was published on September 17, 2013,[75] to positive reviews.
In April 2025,Penguin Press announced a new novel by Pynchon,Shadow Ticket, with a synopsis, which was published on October 7, 2025.[76][77][78] The novel, which is set in 1932, centers on a Milwaukeeprivate investigator who is set adrift in Hungary while tracking the heiress to aWisconsin cheese fortune.[79]
CriticMichiko Kakutani identified a central theme connecting all of Pynchon's novels: "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?"[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 oflow culture, includingcomic books andcartoons,pulp fiction, popular films,television programs,cookery,urban myths,conspiracy theories, andfolk art. This blurring of the conventional boundary between "high" and "low" culture has been seen as one of the defining characteristics of his writing.[80][81]
Pynchon makes frequent musical allusions. McClintic Sphere inV. is a composite of jazz musicians such asOrnette Coleman,Charlie Parker andThelonious Monk. InThe Crying of Lot 49, the lead singer of the Paranoids sports "aBeatle haircut" and sings with an English accent. In the closing pages ofGravity's Rainbow, there is an apocryphal report that Tyrone Slothrop, the novel's protagonist, playedkazoo andharmonica as a guest musician on a record released bythe Fool in the 1960s (havingmagically recovered the latter instrument, his "harp", in a German stream in 1945, after losing it down the toilet in 1939 at the Roseland Ballroom inRoxbury,Boston, to the strains of the jazz standard "Cherokee", upon which tune Charlie Parker was simultaneously inventingbebop in New York, as Pynchon describes). InVineland, both Zoyd Wheeler and Isaiah Two Four are also musicians: Zoyd played keyboards in a '60ssurf band called the Corvairs, while Isaiah played in apunk band called Billy Barf and the Vomitones. InMason & 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; inV., a character sings an aria fromMozart'sDon Giovanni. InLot 49 Oedipa listens to "the Fort Wayne Settecento Ensemble's variorum recording of theVivaldi Kazoo Concerto, Boyd Beaver, soloist." In his introduction toSlow Learner, Pynchon acknowledges a debt to the anarchic bandleaderSpike Jones, and in 1994, he penned a 3,000-word set ofliner notes for the albumSpiked!, a collection of Jones's recordings released on the short-lived BMG Catalyst label.[82] Pynchon also wrote the liner notes forNobody's Cool, the second album ofindie rock bandLotion, 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 ofRoky Erickson.[83]
Investigations and digressions intohuman sexuality,psychology,sociology,mathematics,science, andtechnology recur throughout Pynchon's works. One of his earliest short stories, "Low-lands" (1960), features a meditation onHeisenberg'suncertainty principle as a metaphor for telling stories about one's own experiences. His next published work, "Entropy" (1960), introducedthe 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 acyborg set anachronistically inVictorian-eraEgypt (a precursor of what is now calledsteampunk). This story, significantly reworked by Pynchon, appears as Chapter 3 ofV. "The Secret Integration" (1964), Pynchon's last published short story, is a sensitively handledcoming-of-age tale in which a group of young boys face the consequences of the American policy ofracial integration. At one point in the story, the boys attempt to understand the new policy by way of themathematical operation, the only sense of the word with which they are familiar.
Pynchon's prose, with its wide range of styles and subjects, is commonly classified aspostmodern.[84][85][86] PoetL. E. Sissman wrote inThe 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."[87] Pynchon often engages inparodies orpastiches of other styles;Mason & Dixon is written in the style of the eighteenth-century, when it takes place.Anthony Lane, reviewing the novel inThe 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."[88]
Pynchon makes frequentallusions to other authors; in the introduction toSlow Learner, a collection of his early short stories, he acknowledges his debts to themodernists, especiallyT. S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land, and to theBeats, particularlyJack Kerouac'sOn the Road. He also writes of the influence ofjazz androck and roll, and satiric song lyrics and mockmusical 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."[89]
Thanks to his influence on Gibson and Stephenson in particular, Pynchon became one of the progenitors ofcyberpunk fiction; a 1987 essay inSpin magazine byTimothy Leary explicitly namedGravity's Rainbow as the "Old Testament" of cyberpunk, with Gibson'sNeuromancer 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 includedGravity's Rainbow in the genre, along with other works—Samuel R. Delany'sDhalgren and many works ofPhilip K. Dick—which seem, in hindsight, to anticipate cyberpunk styles and themes. Theencyclopedic nature of Pynchon's novels also led to some attempts to link his work with thehypertext fiction movement of the 1990s.[123]
Ian Rankin, author of theInspector 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 ofThe Crying of Lot 49, the name Quackenbush appears, and you know you are in safely comedic hands."[124]
The main-belt asteroid 152319 is named after Pynchon.[125]
In 2025, after the publication ofShadow Ticket and the release ofOne Battle After Another (a film adaptation ofVineland),Parul Sehgal wrote, "beginning with his novelsV. (1963) andThe Crying of Lot 49 (1966) andGravity's Rainbow (1973), Pynchon unleashed a vision of America that now feels all too familiar—a world swathed in conspiracy and trawled by self-appointed sleuths parsing every passing signal and sign, their paths lit by the bright beam of their own righteousness."[126]
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 ofV. inThe New York Times Book Review described Pynchon as "a recluse" living in Mexico, thereby introducing themedia label with which journalists have characterized him throughout his career.[127] Nonetheless, Pynchon's personal absence frommass media is one of the notable features of his life, and it has generated many rumors and apocryphal anecdotes.
Around 1984, Pynchon wrote an introduction for his short story collectionSlow 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 some of the author's only autobiographical comments to his readers.
After the publication and success ofGravity's Rainbow, interest mounted in finding out more about the identity of the author. At the 1974 National Book Awards ceremony, the president ofViking Press,Tom Guinzberg, arranged for double-talking comedian"Professor" Irwin Corey to accept the prize on Pynchon's behalf.[27] 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.[128] Toward the end of Corey's address astreaker ran through the hall, adding further to the confusion.
An article byJohn Batchelor published in theSoHo Weekly News in 1977 claimed that Pynchon was in factJ. D. Salinger.[129] Pynchon's written response to this theory said that "some of it was true, but none of the interesting parts. Not bad. Keep trying."[120][130]
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 inPlayboy magazine. In his article, Siegel reveals that Pynchon had acomplex about his teeth and underwent extensive and painful reconstructive surgery, was nicknamed "Tom" at Cornell and attendedMass diligently, acted asbest 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 ofVladimir 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 thecrankiness andzealotry that have attached themselves to his name and work in subsequent years.[131]
Pynchon does not like to talk to reporters, and refuses the spectacle ofcelebrity 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 inJanette Turner Hospital's short story "For Mr. Voss or Occupant" (published in 1991), explains to her daughter that she is writing
More recently, book critic Arthur Salm has written:
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 andParis Hilton were ever to meet—the circumstances, I admit, are beyond imagining—the resulting matter/antimatter explosion would vaporize everything from here toTau Ceti IV.[132]
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 thefatwa was pronouncedagainst Rushdie by the Iranian leaderAyatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.[133] The next year, Rushdie's enthusiastic review of Pynchon'sVineland 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".[134]
In 1990, Pynchon married his literary agent, Melanie Jackson—a great-granddaughter ofTheodore Roosevelt and a granddaughter ofRobert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice and Nuremberg trials prosecutor—and fathered a son, Jackson, in 1991.[135] 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 ofMason & Dixon in 1997, aCNN camera crew filmed him inManhattan. 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, saying, "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."[136] The next year, a reporter for theSunday Times managed to snap a photo of him as he was walking with his son.[137]
After several references to Pynchon's work and reputation were made onNBC'sThe 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"), Pynchon apparently vetoed a final scene that called for an extra playing him to be filmed from behind, walking away from the shot.[136][138] Pynchon also insisted that it should be specifically mentioned in the episode that he was seen wearing aRoky Erickson T-shirt.[139] According to theLos Angeles Times, this spurred an increase in sales of Erickson's albums.[140] Also during the 1990s, Pynchon befriended members of the bandLotion and wrote liner notes for the band's 1995 albumNobody's Cool. Although the band initially claimed that he had seen them in concert and become a groupie, in 2009 they toldThe 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.[141] Pynchon then conducted an interview with the band ("Lunch with Lotion") forEsquire in June 1996 in the lead-up to the publication ofMason & Dixon. More recently, Pynchon providedfaxed answers to questions submitted by authorDavid Hajdu and permitted excerpts from his personal correspondence to be quoted in Hajdu's 2001 bookPositively 4th Street: The Lives and Times ofJoan Baez,Bob Dylan,Mimi Baez Fariña andRichard Fariña.[142]
Pynchon's insistence on maintaining his personalprivacy 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 theUnabomber or a sympathizer with the WacoBranch Davidians after the 1993 siege were upstaged in the mid-1990s by the invention of an elaborate rumor that Pynchon and one "Wanda Tinasky" were the same person.[143] A collection of the Tinasky letters was eventually published as a paperback book in 1996; Pynchon denied having written the letters, and no direct attribution of the letters to him was ever made. "Literary detective"Donald Foster subsequently showed that theLetters were in fact written by an obscureBeat 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.[144]
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. The Morgan Library originally intended to allow scholars to view the letters, but at Pynchon's request the Burden family and Morgan Library agreed to seal them until after Pynchon's death.[28]
Pynchon depicted inThe Simpsons episode "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife". HisSimpsons 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 seriesThe Simpsons in 2004. The first occurs in the episode "Diatribe of a Mad Housewife", in whichMarge Simpson becomes a novelist. He plays himself, with a paper bag over his head, and provides a blurb for 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!"[145][146] In his second appearance, in "All's Fair in Oven War", Pynchon's dialogue consists entirely ofpuns on his novel titles ("These wings areV-licious! I'll put this recipe inThe Gravity's Rainbow Cookbook, right next to 'The Frying ofLatke 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". It first aired on November 19, 2006, the Sunday beforeAgainst the Day was released. According toAl 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 producerMatt Selman with several handwritten edits to his lines. Of particular emphasis was Pynchon's outright refusal to utter the line "No wonderHomer is such a fat-ass." Pynchon's objection apparently had nothing to do with the salty language. He wrote in a footnote to the edit, "Homer is my role model and I can't speak ill of him."[147][148]
In celebration of the centenary ofGeorge Orwell's birth, Pynchon wrote a new foreword to Orwell'sNineteen Eighty-Four. The introduction presents a brief biography of Orwell as well as a reflection on some of the critical responses toNineteen 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."[149]
In July 2006,Amazon created a page showing an upcoming 992-page, untitled 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 novel's title,Against the Day.
Shortly beforeAgainst the Day was published, Pynchon's prose appeared in the program for "The Daily Show: Ten Fu@#ing Years (The Concert)", a retrospective onJon Stewart's comedy-news broadcastThe Daily Show.[150]
On December 6, 2006, Pynchon joined a campaign by many other major authors to clearIan McEwan of plagiarism charges by sending atypewritten letter to his British publisher, which was published in theDaily Telegraph newspaper.[151]
Pynchon's 2009YouTube promotional teaser for the novelInherent Vice[152] is the second time a recording of his voice has been released to mainstream outlets (the first being his appearances onThe Simpsons).[74]
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.[153]
In September 2014,Josh Brolin toldThe New York Times that Pynchon had made a cameo in theInherent 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 ofM*A*S*H'sHarry Morgan, claimed thatPaul 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 orWarner Bros. Pictures.[156][157]
On November 6, 2018, Pynchon was photographed near his apartment in New York'sUpper West Side district when he went to vote with his son. The photo was published by theNational Enquirer and was said to be the first photo of him "in decades".[158]
In December 2022, theHuntington 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.[159]
^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.'.
^ab"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.ISBN978-0-521-76974-7.
^Pynchon's contributions to the Oyster HighPurple & Gold were first reprinted on pp. 156–67 of Clifford Mead'sThomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials (Dalkey Archive Press, 1989).
^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.ISBN978-0-521-76974-7.Archived from the original on February 7, 2023. RetrievedFebruary 7, 2023.
^Pettman, Dominic (2002). "Thomas Pynchon". In Bertens, Hans; Natoli, Joseph (eds.).Postmodernism: The Key Figures. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers. pp. 261–266.ISBN978-0-631-21796-1.
^"Fiction"Archived January 3, 2016, at theWayback Machine.Past winners & finalists by category. The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 29, 2012.
^L. Madsen, D., (1998) “Family Legacies: Identifying the Traces of William Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow”, Pynchon Notes , 29-48. doi:https://doi.org/10.16995/pn.138
^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. RetrievedOctober 24, 2016.
^Pynchon, Thomas (April 10, 1988)."The Heart's Eternal Vow".The New York Times.Archived from the original on April 24, 2017. RetrievedFebruary 13, 2017.
^Berressem, Hanjo (1992).Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. pp. 236–7.ISBN978-0-252-01919-7.
^Gray, Paul (October 18, 1993)."Rooms of Their Own".Time Magazine.Archived from the original on August 14, 2014. RetrievedSeptember 26, 2014.
^Duvall, John N., ed. (2002).Productive Postmodernism: Consuming Histories and Cultural Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press. p. 76.ISBN978-0-7914-5193-9.
^Makowsky, Johann A. (2020)."Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics".Notices of the American Mathematical Society.67 (10): 1593.arXiv:1907.05787.doi:10.1090/noti2170.S2CID196470810.the latter contains a lot of mathematical material pertaining to Sofia Kovalevskaya and to Hilbert's school in Göttingen. 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. RetrievedSeptember 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. RetrievedSeptember 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. RetrievedSeptember 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. RetrievedSeptember 26, 2014.
^Rosenthal, Regine (November 1989). "'Gravity's Rainbow' and the postmodern picaro".Revue française d'études américaines.42 (42):407–426.doi:10.3406/rfea.1989.1376.JSTOR20872015.
^Sissman, L.E. (May 19, 1973). "Hieronymus and Robert Bosch: The Art of Thomas Pynchon".The New Yorker.
^Min, Hye Sook (2003). "The Pyncheons ofThe House of the Seven Gables: Questing after Thomas Pynchon".Journal of English and American Studies.2:121–33.
^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.ISBN978-0-7190-5744-1.
^Selman, Matt."Matt Selman".Matt Selman's Twitter Account. Twitter.Archived from the original on September 2, 2014. RetrievedSeptember 5, 2014.The fax sent to us by Thomas Pynchon with his jokes written on the script page
Kharpertian, Theodore D.Thomas Pynchon and Postmodern American Satire pp. 20–2, in KharpertianA 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,ISSN0264-0856
Stevenson, Randall (1983). Review ofThe Small Rain.Cencrastus, No. 11 (New Year 1983), pp. 40 & 41,ISSN0264-0856
Inherent Vice Diagrammed A reader's guide to Pynchon's novelInherent Vice, with diagrams showing all the character relationships, a character-relationship index, and chapter and plot summaries.
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