Thomas Pynchon was born in 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. (1907—1995) and Katherine Frances Bennett (1909—1996). His earliest American ancestor, William Pynchon, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630, and thereafter a long line of Pynchon descendants found wealth and repute on American soil. Pynchon's family background and aspects of his ancestry have provided source material for his fictions, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in the short story "The Secret Integration" (1964) and
Gravity's Rainbow (1973).
Childhood and education
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 (Pynchon 1952—3).
After graduating from high school in 1953 at the age of 16, Pynchon studied engineering physics at Cornell University, but left at the end of his second year to serve in the U.S. Navy. In 1957, he returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. His first published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in the
Cornell Writer in May 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 (10—11).
While at Cornell, Pynchon started his friendships with Richard Fariña and David Shetzline; Pynchon would go on to dedicate
Gravity's Rainbow to Fariña, as well as serve as his best man and as his pallbearer. Together the two briefly led what Pynchon has called a 'micro-cult' around Oakley Hall's 1958 novel
Warlock. Pynchon later reminisced about his college days in the introduction he wrote in 1983 for Fariña's novel
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, first published in 1966. He 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, Véra, who graded her husband's class papers, commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting as a mixture of printed and cursive letters (Sweeney 2008). Other of Pynchon's teachers at Cornell, such as the novelist James McConkey, recall him as being a gifted and exceptional student. In 1958, Pynchon and Cornell classmate Kirkpatrick Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical,
Minstrel Island, which portrayed a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world (Gibbs 1994). Pynchon received his BA in June 1959.
Early career
V.
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 (see Wisnicki 2000—1), 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 much raw material for
Gravity's Rainbow. When published in 1963,
V. won a William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of the year.
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 (see Frost 2003), as he was composing the highly-regarded
Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon during this time flirted with the lifestyle and some of the habits of the Beat and hippie countercultures (see, for example, Gordon 1994).
A negative aspect, in addition to several good ones, 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." (
Introduction, Slow Learner, 1984, pp. 8—9) Some reviewer argued that Pynchon's 1990 novel
Vineland, in which former 1960s rebels, like character Frenesi Gates, betray their past and turn into hypocritical informants helping the FBI spy on suspected radicals,(Patell 2001 p. 129; Bawer 1990; Vineland 1990 p. 74 quote: "snitch community") can be taken as Pynchon's own retrospective assessments of the motives, values, and achievements of the student and youth milieux of the era, including the view that the behavior of the characters in the novel was the prevailing one within various branches of the youth movement of the 1960s, and that such behaviors had a prominent role in a failure of the social revolution in that period.
In 1964, an application to study mathematics as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, was turned down (Royster 2005). In 1966, Pynchon wrote a first-hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Entitled "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts," the article was published in the
New York Times Magazine (Pynchon 1966).
From the mid-1960s Pynchon has also regularly provided blurbs and introductions for a wide range of novels and non-fiction works. One of the first of these pieces was a brief review of Hall's
Warlock which appeared, along with comments by seven other writers on "neglected books", as part of a feature entitled "A Gift of Books" in the December 1965 issue of
Holiday.
The Crying of Lot 49
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." (Gussow 1998)
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." (see McLemee 2006)
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." (Gussow 1998)
The Crying of Lot 49 won the Richard and Hilda 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 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, with both books dwelling on the detritus of American society and culture.
The Crying of Lot 49 also continues Pynchon's strategy of composing parodic song lyrics and punning names, and referencing aspects of popular culture within his prose narratives. In particular, it incorporates a very direct allusion to the protagonist of Nabokov's
Lolita within the lyric of a love lament sung by a member of 'The Paranoids', a teenage band who deliberately sing their songs with British accents (p. 17).
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". (9)
Gravity's Rainbow
Pynchon's most celebrated 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 (Plater 1978; Chambers 1982), the novel has spawned a wealth of commentary and critical material, including reader's guides (Fowler 1980; Weisenburger 1988), books and scholarly articles, online concordances and discussions, and art works. Its artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce's
Ulysses (Ruch 2000). Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post-WW2 novel (226), and it has similarly been described as "literally an anthology of postmodernist themes and devices" (16).
The major portion of
Gravity's Rainbow takes place in London and 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 Nürnberg. 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:
Between the ominous launch and final descent into "terminal orgasm," 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.—Pettman 2002264
The novel invokes anti-authority sentiments, often through violations of narrative conventions and integrity. For example, as the aforementioned 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 and film. Pynchon wrote the first draft of
Gravity's Rainbow in "neat, tiny script on engineer's quadrille paper". (Weisenburger 1988) Pynchon worked on the novel throughout the 1960s and early 1970s while he was living in California and Mexico City.
Gravity's Rainbow was a joint winner of the 1974 National Book Award for Fiction, along with Isaac Bashevis Singer's
A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories. In the same year, the fiction jury unanimously recommended
Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize though the Pulitzer board vetoed the jury's recommendation, describing the novel as "unreadable", "turgid", "overwritten", and in parts "obscene", and no prize was awarded. (Kihss 1974) In 1975, Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Later career
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 entitled "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" was published in the
New York Times Book Review. In April 1988, Pynchon contributed an extensive review of Gabriel García Márquez's novel
Love in the Time of Cholera to the
New York Times, under the title "The Heart's Eternal Vow". Another article, entitled "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".
Vineland
Pynchon's fourth novel,
Vineland, was published in 1990, but disappointed a majority of fans and critics. It did, however, receive some positive reviews, notably from the novelist Salman Rushdie. 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. (Rushdie 1990; 236-7)
In 1988, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and, since the early 1990s at least, many observers have mentioned Pynchon as a Nobel Prize contender (see, for example, Grimes 1993; Ervin 2000). Renowned American literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, along with Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy.[1]
Mason & Dixon
Pynchon's fifth novel,
Mason & Dixon, was published in 1997, though it had been a work in progress since at least January 1975. (Gussow 1998; Ulin 1997)
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 surveyors of the Mason-Dixon line, during the birth of the American Republic. The majority of commentators acknowledged it as a welcome return to form. The noted American critic Harold Bloom has hailed the novel as Pynchon's "masterpiece to date". (Bloom 2003)
Against the Day
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 Göttingen", and that the new novel would trace the life and loves of Sofia Kovalevskaya.
In July 2006, a new untitled novel by Pynchon was announced along with a synopsis written by Pynchon himself, which appeared on Amazon.com, it stated that the novel's action takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I. "With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead", Pynchon wrote in his book description, "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. (Patterson 2006ab; Italie 2006)
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, presumably in accord with Pynchon's wishes. 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 predominantly of a series of interwoven pastiches of popular fiction genres from the era in which it is set, the novel inspired several reactions from critics and reviewers. One reviewer in
Time magazine remarked that, "It is brilliant, but it is exhaustingly brilliant."(Complete Review 2006) The novel's extensive condemnation of capitalism, and its loyalty to the 1960s ideals, was received with great regret by mainstream critics in the US. (Pincio 2009, Complete Review 2006) Some made the point that this was ostensibly the culmination of Pynchon's career and a summation of his personal philosophy, while others noted that it was a "loose baggy monster" which had been pieced together from several long-time Pynchonian works-in-progress and offcuts from other of his novels.
Inherent Vice
Information regarding a new Pynchon novel scheduled for publication in August 2009 was leaked in October 2008 (Kellogg 2008) and subsequently confirmed by a spokesperson for Penguin Press.
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 (28—9, 44). 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 marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog." (Penguin 2009a)
A promotional video for the novel was released by Penguin Books on August 4, 2009, with the character voiceover narrated by the author himself. (Penguin 2009b) This may be found on Youtube [2].