Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (1937-) is an author. Pynchon is best known for his extremely dense postmodernist novels and reclusive life.

Life[]

Due to Pynchon's reclusive nature, little is known about his life.

Born in early May of 1937, Pynchon is the son of an engineer and politician from whom Pynchon got his first name from. As a child, Pynchon was a voracious reader. Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School and got a "student of the year" award before graduating in 1953. Pynchon then attended Cornell University and studied engineering. During his sophomore year, Pynchon enlisted into the Navy.

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From About the Authors sections[]

THOMAS PYNCHON was born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937, and educated at Cornell University. After a stint in the U.S. Navy and at the Boeing Aircraft Corporation in Seattle, Washington, he published his first novel, V., in 1963. He is also the author of The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, Slow Learner (a collection of short stories), and Mason & Dixon. In addition to a National Book Award, he has received the William Dean Howells Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the best novel of the decade for Gravity's Rainbow. (from the Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Gravity's Rainbow).

Writing style[]

Pynchon's novels are notable for the dicothomy between the highly-detailed prose and the lascivious details within their plot. Paranoiac behaviour is also common in his works - most notably in The Crying of Lot 49. Another common theme is secret societies - most notably in both Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow, with Mason & Dixon being the most prurient example of this theme (or belief) being that secret societies have worked their way into American society. The most common theme is the examination of a historical era and its collapse.

The most common work discussed within Pynchon's works include the 1960s - with The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice discussing its counterculture while Vineland discusses the afterimage of the 1960s within the 1980s. Pynchon has also discussed historical eras, most notably within Against the Day (the latter years of the 19th century) and Mason & Dixon (America shortly before the Revolutionary War) but also World War II in Gravity's Rainbow - which happened while Pynchon was a toddler.

Pynchon's works (most notably Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49) feature song lyrics woven into their prose. While Mason & Dixon does not feature many song lyrics, it does feature quotations from fictional sources (such as the Pennsylvaniad of Timothy Tox and Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke's writings).

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Connections to other authors[]

While studying at Cornell, Pynchon befriended the author Richard Fariña and provided an introduction to his novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me. Both authors were influenced by the works of Oakley Hall - most notably his novel Warlock. Pynchon also allegedly took lectures from the author Vladimir Nabokov while at Cornell. While Nabokov had no memory of Pynchon, his wife Vera remembered his handwriting.

In reviewing Gabriel García Márquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera, Pynchon said: "The Garcimarquesian voice we have come to recognize from the other fiction has matured, found and developed new resources, been brought to a level where it can at once be classical and familiar, opalescent and pure, able to praise and curse, laugh and cry, fabulate and sing and when called upon, take off and soar."

Pynchon, along with similar postmodernist authors such as Don DeLillo and John Barth, were influences on the author David Foster Wallace.

Notable quotes[]

The Crying of Lot 49[]

Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?
Like so many named places in California it was less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts--census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

Gravity's Rainbow[]

It's been a prevalent notion. Fallen sparks. Fragments of vessels broken at the Creation. And someday, somehow, before the end, a gathering back to home. A messenger from the Kingdom, arriving at the last moment. But I tell you there is no such message, no such home -- only the millions of last moments . . . nothing more. Our history is an aggregate of last moments.
Don't forget the real business of war is buying and selling. The murdering and violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimolous to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up. The true war is a celebration of markets.
Kekulé dreams the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this dream is to be used. The Serpent that announces, "The World is a closed thing, cyclical, resonant, eternally-returning," is to be delivered into a system whose only aim is to violate the Cycle. Taking and not giving back, demanding that "productivity" and "earnings" keep on increasing with time, the System removing from the rest of the World these vast quantities of energy to keep its own tiny desperate fraction showing a profit: and not only most of humanity—most of the World, animal, vegetable, and mineral, is laid waste in the process. The System may or may not understand that it's only buying time. And that time is an artificial resource to begin with, of no value to anyone or anything but the System, which must sooner or later crash to its death, when its addiction to energy has become more than the rest of the World can supply, dragging with it innocent souls all along the chain of life. Living inside the System is like riding across the country in a bus driven by a maniac bent on suicide . . . though he's amiable enough, keeps cracking jokes back through the loudspeaker . . .

Notable works[]

Mortality and Mercy in Vienna (printed in Epoch Issue #9) - one of Pynchon's uncollected short stories.
V. - Pynchon's debut novel. Tells of two men looking for the titular woman.
The Crying of Lot 49 - A novel telling of a conspiracy about two different postal services.
A Journey into the Mind of Watts (printed in New York Times Magazine, June 12th 1966) - an essay on the Watts Riots
Gravity's Rainbow - A novel of World War II - specifically the Blitz and its V-2 bombs.
Slow Learner - A collection of short stories.
- The Small Rain (printed in the Cornell Writer #2) - Pynchon's first published short story. On the cleanup of an island after a hurricane.
- Low-lands (printed in New World Writing #16) - the debut of Pig Bodine
- Entropy (printed in the Kenyon Review #22) - a short story about the titular concept
- Under the Rose (printed in The Noble Savage #3) - a spy short story set in Egypt
- The Secret Integration (printed in The Saturday Evening Post #237) - about a group of kids who form a Junta
Vineland - A novel about various people's lives being impacted by the 1960s.
Nearer, My Couch, to Thee (printed in Deadly Sins) - an essay on the sin of sloth
Mason & Dixon - A novel about the creators of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Against the Day - A novel about the latter years of the 20th century.
Inherent Vice - A novel about the psychedelic side of the 1960s.
Bleeding Edge - A novel about the early years of the Internet.

Gallery[]

Sources[]

Wikipedia
Lit Tips' "American History As Told by Pynchon" video

Works of Thomas Pynchon
Early works (Collected in Slow Learner) The Small Rain, Low-lands, Entropy, Under the Rose, The Secret Integration Early novels (1950s-1980s) V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland Modern novels (1990s-present day) Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge Major and recurring characters Weissman, Pig Bodine, Benny Profane, Blood Chiclitz/Yoyodyne,Oedipa Maas, Tyrone Slothrop, Pirate, Dr. Pointsman, Freseni Gates, Brock Vond, Reverend Wicks Cherrycoke, Charles Mason, Jeremiah Dixon, Scarsdale Vibe, Doc Sportello, Maxine Tarnow

Thomas Pynchon

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