Thomas Pynchon

With hundreds of scholarly works devoted to his writing, Thomas Pynchon is easily the most studied post–World War II American writer. During the six decades of his career, he has published eight novels, a collection of short stories, and more than a dozen essays, introductions, and reviews on diverse authors and topics. Pynchon’s novels are widely regarded as encyclopedic, labyrinthine narratives that explore the dimensions of American fantasies carved into history, watermarking American culture from the eighteenth century to the present. Famously elusive, never interviewed, and rarely photographed, Pynchon has consistently insisted that he is to be known by his writing, not his life. He was born on 8 May 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, and wrote a column for the his high school newspaper entitled “The Voice of the Hamster.” He graduated from Cornell University in 1959 with a B.A. in English, his college career interrupted by a two-year stint in the Navy. He began writing stories in college, and published his first novel, V. in 1963, which brought him immediate recognition when it won the William Faulkner Foundation best first novel award. The Crying of Lot 49 was published three years later; it paralleled V. in establishing Pynchon’s perennial interest in historical conspiracies and American paranoia. Pynchon’s next, “big” novel—one that many consider to be his magnum opus—was Gravity’s Rainbow, published in 1973, a co-winner of the National Book Award. This novel of war, fantasy, and historical fatality established Pynchon as a major presence, and was followed by a tidal surge of scholarship. His early short stories, collected in Slow Learner, appeared in 1984. Vineland (1990) followed, and was regarded by some as a lesser work and a letdown after Gravity’s Rainbow in its portrayal of “hippie” life in 1980s California. Two successive “big” novels, Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006) are concerned with borders and empires from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries in America. Inherent Vice (2009) is a neo-noir fiction set in 1970s California; his most recent work, Bleeding Edge (2013), is set in Manhattan during the months preceding and the days immediately following 9/11. Pynchon’s essays have received robust attention from his readers as significant non-fictional occasions for social critique. Like Joyce, Pynchon seems to be an author who will attract generations of scholars, and the bounty of scholarship on his work will only grow with the opening of the Pynchon archive, recently acquired by the Huntington Library.