Thomas Pynchon

Long Island made him — Glen Cove first, then Oyster Bay, where he skipped two grades and finished high school at 16. Cornell took him in 1953 to study engineering physics. At the end of his sophomore year he enlisted in the Navy, trained as an electrician, and in 1956 was aboard the destroyer USS Hank in the Mediterranean during the Suez Crisis. He returned to Cornell for an English degree instead. Vladimir Nabokov was teaching there, and Pynchon sat in on some of his lectures, though Nabokov later said he had no memory of him. Then Boeing, in Seattle, where from 1960 to 1962 he wrote safety copy for a newsletter about the Bomarc surface-to-air missile. Gravity's Rainbow came out of that desk.

Six decades of novels, and the shape of the career is as odd as the books. V., in 1963, won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for a first novel. The Crying of Lot 49 followed in 1966, short and strange. Gravity's Rainbow, in 1973, is the one the arguments are about — rocket physics, paranoia and vaudeville, set in the last months of the war in Europe. Then 17 years without a novel, and then Vineland, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day, Inherent Vice, Bleeding Edge, and in 2025, at 88, Shadow Ticket.

The absence is not a stunt. When a CNN crew filmed him on a Manhattan street in 1997, he telephoned the network and asked that he not be identified in the footage. He also told them that recluse was a journalist's code word meaning a man who does not like talking to reporters, and that he simply preferred not to be photographed. No published photograph of him in public dates from later than the 1950s, and he gives no interviews. The public record is thin and unremarkable: he lives in New York, he married his literary agent, Melanie Jackson, in 1990, and they have a son. The irony is complete. Refusing to be a face made him the most speculated-about writer in America, and a 1990s hunt for him by journalists was widely criticised.

He has been argued over since 1974, when Gravity's Rainbow shared the National Book Award and Viking sent the double-talking comedian Irwin Corey to collect it. Corey delivered a torrent of pseudo-scholarly nonsense and much of the audience believed it was Pynchon. The Pulitzer fiction jury had unanimously recommended the same book. The Pulitzer board overruled them, calling it unreadable, turgid, overwritten and in parts obscene, and gave no fiction prize that year. He took a MacArthur in 1988, declined the Howells Medal in 1975, and has been a perennial Nobel name since. In 2004 he did two cameos on The Simpsons, playing himself with a paper bag over his head.

Thomas Pynchon's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• V. book
  First novel — won the William Faulkner Foundation Award 1963
• The Crying of Lot 49 book
  The short one, and the one most often assigned 1966
• Gravity's Rainbow book
  Shared the 1974 National Book Award. The Pulitzer board vetoed it. 1973
• Mason & Dixon book
  The survey of the line, written in mock-18th-century English 1997
• Against the Day book
  1,085 pages, from the 1893 Chicago fair to the years after the First World War 2006
• Inherent Vice book
  Filmed by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014 2009

• May 8, 1937 aged 0 Born in Glen Cove, New York The eldest of three children of an engineer and a nurse.
• 1953 aged ~16 Enters Cornell at 16 to study engineering physics He had skipped two grades and was named student of the year at Oyster Bay High School.
• 1956 aged ~19 Serves aboard the destroyer USS Hank during the Suez Crisis He had enlisted in the Navy at the end of his sophomore year and trained as an electrician.
• June 1959 aged 22 Graduates from Cornell in English, Phi Beta Kappa His first published story, The Small Rain, had appeared in the Cornell Writer that March.
• February 1960 aged 22 Starts at Boeing in Seattle writing for the Bomarc Service News Safety articles for a surface-to-air missile newsletter, until September 1962.
• 1963 aged ~26 Publishes V. and wins the William Faulkner Foundation Award George Plimpton called him a writer of staggering promise.
• 1973 aged ~36 Publishes Gravity's Rainbow Drafted in tiny script on engineer's quadrille paper while he was living in California and Mexico City.
• 1974 aged ~37 Irwin Corey collects the National Book Award in his place The same year, the Pulitzer board overruled its own fiction jury on Gravity's Rainbow and gave no fiction prize at all.
• 1997 aged ~60 A CNN crew films him in Manhattan and he asks not to be identified I prefer not to be photographed, he told the network.

• J. D. Salinger 1919–2010
  Author whose fiction, especially The Catcher in the Rye, became a lasting touchstone of adolescent alienation. rumoured to be the same man
• David Foster Wallace 1962–2008
  Novelist and essayist whose Infinite Jest became a defining postmodern American novel. influenced
• Philip Roth 1933–2018
  Novelist whose explorations of Jewish American identity and sexuality earned him a Pulitzer Prize. ranked alongside by Harold Bloom
• Kurt Vonnegut 1922–2007
  Satirical novelist whose Slaughterhouse-Five became an anti-war classic of 20th-century literature. shared the postwar American comic novel