American novelist (born 1937)
Thomas Pynchon
|
---|
Pynchon in 1953 yearbook image
|
Born
| Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.
(
1937-05-08
)
May 8, 1937
(age 87)
Glen Cove, New York
, U.S.
|
---|
Education
| Cornell University
(
BA
)
|
---|
Period
| c.
1959
?present
|
---|
Notable works
| |
---|
Spouse
|
Melanie Jackson
(
m.
1990)
|
---|
Children
| 1
|
---|
|
|
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr.
(
PIN
-chon
,
[1]
[2]
commonly
PIN
-ch?n
;
[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]
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
]
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 naval 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]
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]
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]
Pynchon 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."
[18]
[19]
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.
[20]
Pynchon received his
B.A.
with distinction as a member of
Phi Beta Kappa
in June 1959.
Career
[
edit
]
Early career
[
edit
]
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
.
[21]
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.
[22]
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."
[23]
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
,
[24]
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.
[25]
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
.
[26]
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."
[27]
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".
[28]
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?"
[29]
.
The Crying of Lot 49
[
edit
]
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."
[30]
In the mid-1960s, Pynchon lived at 217 33rd St. in
Manhattan Beach, California
, in a small downstairs apartment.
[31]
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."
[32]
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."
[30]
The Crying of Lot 49
won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award shortly after publication.
[33]
[34]
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."
[35]
Gravity's Rainbow
[
edit
]
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
,
[36]
[37]
there is 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 of
James Joyce
's
Ulysses
.
[40]
Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post-WW2 novel,
[41]
and it has similarly been described as "literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices".
[42]
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
."
[43]
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.
[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 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
".
[39]
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".
[33]
(No Pulitzer Prize For Fiction was awarded that year and finalists were not recognized before 1980.)
[45]
In 1975, Pynchon declined the
William Dean Howells Medal
.
[46]
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."
[47]
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
]
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
.
[48]
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."
[49]
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
".
[50]
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."
[51]
Vineland
[
edit
]
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."
[52]
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.
[53]
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
.
[54]
[55]
[56]
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."
[57]
Mason & Dixon
[
edit
]
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."
[58]
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."
[59]
The American critic
Harold Bloom
hailed the novel as Pynchon's "masterpiece to date".
[60]
Bloom named Pynchon as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with
Cormac McCarthy
,
Philip Roth
and
Don DeLillo
.
[61]
[62]
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."
[63]
Against the Day
[
edit
]
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
.
[64]
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.
[65]
[66]
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."
[67]
Other reviewers described
Against the Day
as "lengthy and rambling"
[68]
and "a baggy monster of a book",
[69]
while negative appraisals condemned the novel for its "silliness"
[70]
or characterized its action as "fairly pointless" and remained unimpressed by its "grab bag of themes".
[71]
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."
[72]
Inherent Vice
[
edit
]
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.
[73]
A 2014 film adaptation of the
same name
was directed by
Paul Thomas Anderson
.
Bleeding Edge
[
edit
]
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,
[74]
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."
[75]
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."
[76]
Pynchon's prose, with its wide range of styles and subjects, is commonly classified as
postmodern
.
[77]
[78]
[79]
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."
[80]
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?"
[59]
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.
[81]
[82]
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.
[83]
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
.
[84]
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),
[85]
Emily Dickinson
(in
Gravity’s Rainbow
, pp. 27?8),
Umberto Eco
(in
Mason & Dixon
, p. 559),
[86]
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.
[87]
[88]
[89]
[90]
Critics have made comparisons of Pynchon's writing with works by
Rabelais
,
[91]
[92]
Cervantes
,
[91]
[93]
Laurence Sterne
,
[94]
[95]
Edgar Allan Poe
,
[96]
[97]
Nathaniel Hawthorne
,
[98]
[99]
Herman Melville
,
[91]
[100]
Charles Dickens
,
[101]
[102]
Joseph Conrad
,
[103]
[104]
Thomas Mann
,
[105]
[106]
William S. Burroughs
,
[107]
[108]
Ralph Ellison
,
[108]
[109]
Patrick White
,
[110]
[111]
and
Toni Morrison
.
[89]
[112]
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
.
[37]
[113]
[114]
[115]
[116]
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).
[117]
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.
[118]
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."
[119]
The main-belt asteroid 152319 is named after Pynchon.
[120]
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.
[121]
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.
[25]
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.
[122]
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
.
[123]
Pynchon's written response to this theory said that “some of it was true, but none of the interesting parts. Not bad. Keep trying.”
[115]
[124]
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.
[125]
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.
[110]
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.
[126]
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
.
[127]
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".
[128]
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.
[129]
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."
[130]
The next year, a reporter for the
Sunday Times
managed to snap a photo of him as he was walking with his son.
[131]
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.
[130]
[132]
Pynchon also insisted that it should be specifically mentioned in the episode that Pynchon was seen wearing a
Roky Erickson
T-shirt.
[133]
According to the
Los Angeles Times
, this spurred an increase in sales of Erickson's albums.
[134]
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.
[135]
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 Farina
and
Richard Farina
.
[136]
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.
[137]
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.
[138]
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.
[30]
2000s
[
edit
]
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, a show which he is a fan of. 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!"
[139]
[140]
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."
[141]
[142]
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."
[143]
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
.
[144]
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.
[145]
Pynchon's 2009
YouTube
promotional teaser for the novel
Inherent Vice
[146]
is the second time a recording of his voice has been released to mainstream outlets (the first being his appearances on
The Simpsons
).
[73]
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.
[147]
In 2013, his son, Jackson Pynchon, graduated from
Columbia University
, where he was affiliated with
St. Anthony Hall
.
[148]
[149]
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
.
[150]
[151]
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".
[152]
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.
[153]
Bibliography
[
edit
]
See also
[
edit
]
References
[
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 & 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.
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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
]
These audio files were created from a revision of this article dated 16 March 2006
(
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)
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- The following links were last verified on May 31, 2017.
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