Thomas Pynchon

Born Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. on May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, into a family whose American roots stretched back to the 1630 Massachusetts Bay Colony, Thomas Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School, where his precocious intelligence was already evident, before enrolling at Cornell University in 1953. He left after his sophomore year to serve two years in the United States Navy, then returned to Cornell, where he studied engineering physics and English, took a class with Vladimir Nabokov, and graduated in 1959. After a brief stint as a technical writer at Boeing in Seattle , where he reportedly worked on documentation for the Bomarc missile, an experience that fed directly into his fiction , he vanished from public view and has maintained an almost total anonymity ever since. V. (1963), his debut novel, won the William Faulkner Foundation Award. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a compact parable of paranoia and entropy set in Southern California, introduced a wider readership to his obsessions. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), a nine-hundred-page labyrinth set in the final days of World War II and its aftermath, won the National Book Award and was unanimously recommended for the Pulitzer Prize by the fiction jury, only to be overruled by the advisory board, who called it “unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene.” No Pulitzer for fiction was awarded that year. Mason & Dixon (1997) reimagined the eighteenth-century surveyors in mock-period prose. Against the Day (2006) and Inherent Vice (2009) followed. Pynchon has never given an interview, never appeared at a ceremony, and has been photographed in public only a handful of times since 1957.