Thomas Pynchon

American novelist

Date of Birth	:	08 May, 1937
Place of Birth	:	Glen Cove, New York, United States
Profession	:	Screenwriter, Novelist, Essayist
Nationality	:	American

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. (/ˈpɪntʃɒn/ PIN-chon, commonly /ˈpɪntʃən/ PIN-chən) is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.

Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as the 1980s; the novel, Mason & Dixon, was published in 1997 to critical acclaim. His 2009 novel Inherent Vice was adapted into a feature film by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive from the media; few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about his location and identity have circulated since the 1960s. Pynchon's most recent novel, Bleeding Edge, was published on September 17, 2013.

Early life

Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, one of three children of engineer and politician Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Sr. (1907–1995) and Katherine Frances Bennett (1909–1996), a nurse. During his childhood, Pynchon alternately attended Episcopal services with his father and Roman Catholic services with his mother.

Career

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, 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. V. won the William Faulkner Foundation Award For Notable First Novel and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Media scrutiny of private life

Relatively little is known about Pynchon's private life; he has carefully avoided contact with reporters for more than fifty 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.

A 1963 review of V. in The New York Times Book Review described Pynchon as "a recluse" living in Mexico, thereby introducing the media label with which journalists have characterized him throughout his career. Nonetheless, Pynchon's personal absence from mass media is one of the notable features of his life, and it has generated many rumors and apocryphal anecdotes.

Pynchon wrote an introduction for his short story collection Slow Learner. His comments on the stories after reading them again for the first time in many years, and his recollection of the events surrounding their creation, amount to the author's only autobiographical comments to his readers.