Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist. He is known for his dense, complex works of postmodern fiction, which are distinguished by their paranoid tone, absurd humor, and references to history, art, science, and popular culture. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive. Few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
Born on 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., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow. For the latter, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Pynchon followed with the novels Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, which was adapted for film in 2014, and Bleeding Edge. Pynchon's latest novel, Shadow Ticket, was published in 2025.
Early life
Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of engineer and politician Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Sr. and Katherine Frances Bennett, a nurse. As a child, Pynchon alternately attended an Episcopal church with his father and a Catholic church with his mother.Education and naval career
A "voracious reader and precocious writer", Pynchon is believed to have skipped two grades before high school. He attended Oyster Bay High School in Oyster Bay, where he was named "student of the year" and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper. These juvenilia incorporated some of the literary motifs and subject matter he has used throughout his career: oddball names, sophomoric humor, illicit drug use, and paranoia.Pynchon graduated from high school in 1953 at age 16. That fall, he went to Cornell University to study engineering physics. At the end of his sophomore year, he enlisted 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. In 1956, he was aboard the destroyer USS Hank in the Mediterranean during the Suez Crisis. According to recollections from his Navy friends, Pynchon said at the time that he did not intend to complete his college education.
File:USS Hank on 26 August 1944.jpg|thumb|left|upright=1.2|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. Pynchon's later fiction draws freely upon his experiences in the Navy. His short story "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" was published in the Spring 1959 issue of Epoch magazine.
While at Cornell, Pynchon befriended Richard Fariña, Kirkpatrick Sale, and David Shetzline. Pynchon dedicated Gravity's Rainbow to Fariña, and served as his best man and his pallbearer. In Pynchon's introduction to Fariña's novel Been 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 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." Pynchon reportedly attended lectures by Vladimir Nabokov, who at the time taught literature at Cornell. Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon, but Nabokov's wife Véra, who graded her husband's class papers, said she remembered his distinctive handwriting as a mixture of printed and cursive letters, "half printing, half script". In 1958, Pynchon and Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical, Minstrel Island, which portrays a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world. Pynchon received his B.A. with distinction as a member of Phi Beta Kappa in June 1959.
Career
Early career
1950s
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. 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 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.George Plimpton gave the book a positive review in The New York Times, calling it 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".
Times 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?"
1960s
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 where he lived as he was composing what became Gravity's Rainbow.In 1964 he applied to study mathematics as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, but was turned down.
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."
From the mid-1960s Pynchon regularly provided blurbs and introductions for a wide range of novels and nonfiction 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."
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 said he was "too stubborn to let any of them go, let alone all of them."
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."
The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hinda 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 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 connections 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, technology, and 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. 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
In June 1966, Pynchon wrote "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts", a firsthand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles published in The New York Times Magazine.
Pynchon retrospectively found that the hippie 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."
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".