Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon (born in Glen Cove, New York, in 1937) is an American novelist and one of the most influential voices in postmodern and maximalist fiction. His dense, labyrinthine books are marked by a paranoid tone, unruly humor, and constant references to history, science, art, and popular culture. He is widely regarded as one of the great American novelists of his generation and is often mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

He grew up on Long Island as one of three children. At Oyster Bay High School he was named student of the year and wrote stories full of odd names, jokes, and themes that would return in his novels. He studied engineering physics at Cornell University, left to enlist in the U.S. Navy, and later returned to Cornell to complete an English degree in 1959. There he became friends with Richard Fariña, and the two shared a passion for Oakley Hall's novel Warlock. After college he worked as a technical writer for Boeing, an experience that gave him the fictional company Yoyodyne. His first novel, V., appeared in 1963 and won a prize for best first book. After time spent in New York, Mexico, and California, he published The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a shorter and more linear book, and then Gravity's Rainbow (1973), generally considered his masterpiece. Its mix of paranoia, conspiracy, and entropy, combined with a virtuosity few novelists had reached, won the National Book Award, though its Pulitzer jury recommendation was overturned by the prize's administrators, who judged it obscene. Pynchon later declined the medal he was offered. He followed with Vineland (1990), set in California between the counterculture of the sixties and the repression of the Nixon years, and Mason & Dixon (1997), a period novel about the line that divided North and South.

Pynchon has kept himself notoriously out of view. Few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about where he lives have circulated for decades. His work, however, has shaped American fiction for half a century. His ambition to write total novels, with encyclopedic learning and a free use of parody, has served as a model for many younger writers. Critics such as Harold Bloom have placed him among the greatest American novelists of his time, and his name remains essential to any account of postmodern narrative.