Author Bio
• Birth— May 8, 1937
• Where—Glen Cove, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University
• Awards—National Book Award; William Faulkner
Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist, noted for his dense and complex novels. Both his fiction and nonfiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles, and themes, including history, science, and mathematics. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1974 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and he is regularly cited by Americans as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Many observers have mentioned Pynchon as a Nobel Prize contender, and renowned critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time—along with Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy.
Pynchon is also known for being very private; very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s.
Family background
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, then became the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts in 1636, 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).
Early years
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.
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.
After leaving Cornell, Pynchon was employed as a technical writer at Boeing in Seattle, Washinton, 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 much raw material for Gravity's Rainbow.
After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Pynchon began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973).
Early novels and writings
• V. was published in 1963, winning 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. It was during this time he flirted with the lifestyle of the Beat and hippie countercultures. In 1964, his application to the graduate program in mathematics at UCC-Berkeley was rejected.
In 1966, he wrote a first-hand report on the Watts riots in Los Angeles—"A Journey Into the Mind of Watts," published in the New York Times Magazine.
• The Crying of Lot 49
In 1966, a few months after turning down an offer to teach at Bennington College in Vermont, Pychon published his second novel, The Crying of Lot 49. 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.
Crying Lot 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 obscure historical events. Both books dwell on the detritus of American society and culture. The novel continues Pynchon's strategy of composing parodic song lyrics and punning names, and referencing aspects of popular culture within his prose narratives.
• Gravity's Rainbow
Published in 1973, Pynchon's third novel is his most celebrated. An intricate and allusive fiction that combines and elaborates on many of the themes of his earlier work—paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity, and entropy—the novel has spawned a wealth of commentary and critical material. Its artistic value is often compared to that of James Joyce's Ulysses. Some scholars have hailed it as the greatest American post-WW2 novel.
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. Encyclopedic in scope and often self-conscious in style, the novel displays erudition in psychology, chemistry, mathematics, history, religion, music, literature, and film.
Gravity's Rainbow shared the 1974 National Book Award with A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, while the Pulitzer board vetoed its own jury's recommendation, describing the novel as "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and in parts "obscene."
Later novels and writings
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, his article "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 Garcia Marquez's novel Love in the Time of Cholera to the New York Times, under the title "The Heart's Eternal Vow."
• Vineland
Pynchon's fourth novel, released in 1990, disappointed a majority of fans and critics. Set in California in the 1960s and 1980s, it 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 between resistance and complicity—with a Pynchon's typical humor.
• Mason & Dixon
Pynchon's fifth novel was published in 1997. A sprawling postmodernist saga recounting the lives and careers of the English astronomer, Charles Mason, and his partner, the surveyor Jeremiah Dixon—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.
• Against the Day
Released in 2006, Against the Day weighed in at 1,085 pages with over 100 characters. Composed in part of a series of interwoven popular fiction genres, the novel inspired mixed reactions: "exhaustingly brilliant" or "lengthy and rambling." Its extensive condemnation of capitalism, and loyalty to the 1960s ideals was received with regret by mainstream critics in the US.
• Inherent Vice
Pynchon's seventh novel, pubished in 2009, was described by its 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."
• Bleeding Edge
Published in 2013, Pynchon's most recent novel 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."
Themes
Along with its emphasis on racism and imperialism, Pynchon's work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological ideas in quirky and approachable ways. His writings demonstrate a strong affinity with "low culture"—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 is one of the defining characteristics of his writing.
Investigations and digressions into the realms of human sexuality, psychology, sociology, mathematics, science, and technology recur throughout Pynchon's works.
- The Crying of Lot 49 also alludes to entropy and communication theory and contains parodies of calculus, Zeno's paradoxes, and the thought experiment known as Maxwell's demon. It investigates homosexuality, celibacy and both medically sanctioned and illicit psychedelic drug use.
- Gravity's Rainbow describes many varieties of sexual fetishism. It 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
The wildly eccentric characters, frenzied action, frequent digressions, and imposing lengths of Pynchon's novels have led critic James Wood to classify Pynchon's work as "hysterical realism." Other writers whose work has been labeled as hysterical realism include Steve Erickson, Neal Stephenson, and Zadie Smith.
Privacy
Relatively little is known about Thomas Pynchon's private life; he has carefully avoided contact with reporters for more than forty 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.
At the 1974 National Book Awards ceremony, which he won for Gravity's Rainbow, a double-talking comedian "Professor" Irwin Corey accepted the prize on Pynchon's behalf. Many guests assumed it was actually Pynchon delivering Corey's trademark torrent of rambling, pseudo-scholarly verbiage. Adding to the confusion, a streaker ran through the hall at the end of Corey's address.
A 1976 article in the Soho Weekly News claimed that Pynchon was in fact J. D. Salinger. Pynchon's written response was simple: "Not bad. Keep trying."
Pynchon does not like to talk with reporters, and refuses the spectacle of celebrity and public appearances. Journalists have continued to speculate about why. Book critic Arthur Salm wrote in 2004 that Pynchon...
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.
In the early 1990s, 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. The two have a son, Jackson, born in 1991.
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. In 1997, a CNN camera crew filmed him in Manhattan.
Angered by this invasion of his privacy, Pynchon called CNN asking that he not be identified in the footage of the street scenes near his home. "Recluse," he told CNN, is "a code word generated by journalists...meaning, doesn't like to talk to reporters." "Let me be unambiguous," he said. "I prefer not to be photographed." The next year, a reporter for the UK Sunday Times managed to snap a photo of him walking with his son.
During 2004, Pynchon made two cameo animated appearances on the television series The Simpsons. He wanted to do the show because his son was a big fan. (Adaptd from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/26/2013.)