William pynchon thomas pynchon biography

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William Pynchon, ancestor of the American novelist Thomas Pynchon, was the founder of Springfield, Massachusetts, a successful fur trader, merchant, and magistrate, and at age 60 wrote the first of many books to be banned in Boston.

Thomas Pynchon. New York, NY: Chelsea House, 1986. Although the Morgan Library originally intended to allow scholars to view the letters, at Pynchon’s request the Burden family and Morgan Library agreed to seal these letters until after Pynchon's death (see Gussow 1998). On November 21, 2006, Pynchon's highly ambitious work, "Against the Day," was published.

In 1966, Pynchon wrote a first-hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts riots in Los Angeles.

Biography

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). Perhaps appropriately for a book so suffused with engineering knowledge, Pynchon wrote the first draft of Gravity's Rainbow in "neat, tiny script on engineer's quadrille paper" (Weisenburger 1988).

His 2009 novel, "Inherent Vice," was also met with mixed reactions due to its relative simplicity compared to his other works. 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. Simultaneously, the novel also investigates homosexuality, celibacy, and both medically-sanctioned and illicit psychedelic drug use.

In the same year, the fiction jury unanimously recommended Gravity's Rainbow for the Pulitzer Prize; however, 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).

After resigning from Boeing, Pynchon spent 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 (Frost 2003), as he was composing his most highly regarded work, Gravity's Rainbow. The letters ranged from 1963 to 1982, thus covering some of the author's most creative and prolific years.

Everybody's America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 2008. 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 entitled The Courier's Tragedy, and a corporate conspiracy involving the bones of World War II American GIs being used as charcoal cigarette filters.

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 in intricate detail and, like Gravity's Rainbow, is an archetypal example of the genre of historiographic metafiction.

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. Younger contemporary writers who have been touted as heirs apparent to Pynchon include David Foster Wallace, William Vollmann, Richard Powers, Steve Erickson, David Mitchell, Neal Stephenson, Dave Eggers, and Tommaso Pincio whose pseudonym is an Italian rendering of Pynchon's name.

In 1988, he received a MacArthur Fellowship and, since the early 1990s at least, many observers have mentioned Pynchon as a Nobel Prize contender (Grimes 1993). His second novel, "The Crying of Lot 49," was published in 1966 and received a warm reception.