43 Facts About Thomas Pynchon

For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 US National Book Award for Fiction.

Thomas 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, although he did voice himself on two episodes of The Simpsons.

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.

Thomas Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School in Oyster Bay, where he was awarded "student of the year" and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper.

Thomas Pynchon graduated from high school in 1953 at the age of 16.

Thomas Pynchon attended boot camp at United States Naval Training Center Bainbridge, Maryland, then received training to be an electrician at a base in Norfolk, Virginia.

Thomas Pynchon's first published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in the Cornell Writer in March 1959, and narrates an actual experience of a friend who had served in the Army; subsequently episodes and characters throughout Pynchon's fiction draw freely upon his own experiences in the Navy.

Thomas Pynchon would go on to dedicate Gravity's Rainbow to Farina, and to serve as his best man and his pallbearer.

In 1966, Thomas Pynchon wrote a first-hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, titled "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts", and published in The New York Times Magazine.

Thomas Pynchon contributed an appreciation of Oakley Hall's Warlock in a feature called "A Gift of Books" in the December 1965 issue of Holiday.

In 1968, Thomas Pynchon was one of 447 signatories to the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest".

In December 1965, Thomas Pynchon politely turned down an invitation from Stanley Edgar Hyman to teach literature at Bennington College, writing that he had resolved, two or three years earlier, to write three novels at once.

Whether it was one of the three or four novels Thomas Pynchon had in progress is not known, but in a 1965 letter to Donadio, Thomas Pynchon had written that he was in the middle of writing a "potboiler".

Thomas Pynchon wrote the first draft of Gravity's Rainbow in "neat, tiny script on engineer's quadrille paper".

Thomas Pynchon worked on the novel throughout the 1960s and early 1970s while he was living in California and Mexico City.

In 1989, Thomas Pynchon was one of many authors who signed a letter of solidarity with Salman Rushdie after Rushdie was sentenced to death by the Ayatollah for his novel The Satanic Verses.

An edited version of Thomas Pynchon's synopsis was used as the jacket-flap copy and Kovalevskaya does appear, although as only one of over a hundred characters.

Thomas Pynchon's memory seems, as ever, not only to have gorged itself on facts and figures but to have kept the whole lot down.

Thomas Pynchon is furiously clever, but more important and, I suspect, more enduring, is his anatomy of melancholy, his conjuring of a doleful burlesque.

Thomas Pynchon writes of the influence of jazz and rock and roll, and satiric song lyrics and mock musical numbers are a trademark of his fiction.

Thomas Pynchon's work explores philosophical, theological, and sociological ideas exhaustively, though in quirky and approachable ways.

Thomas Pynchon's next published work, "Entropy", introduced the concept which was to become synonymous with Pynchon's name.

Thanks to his influence on Gibson and Stephenson in particular, Thomas Pynchon became one of the progenitors of cyberpunk fiction; a 1987 essay in Spin magazine by Timothy Leary explicitly named Gravity's Rainbow as the "Old Testament" of cyberpunk, with Gibson's Neuromancer and its sequels as the "New Testament".

The encyclopedic nature of Thomas Pynchon's novels led to some attempts to link his work with the hypertext fiction movement of the 1990s.

Thomas Pynchon wrote action novels about spies and soldiers which happened to be detective stories and bawdy romps.

Thomas Pynchon's books were picaresquely post-modern and his humour was Marxian.

Thomas Pynchon wrote an introduction for his short story collection Slow Learner.

An article by John Batchelor published in the SoHo Weekly News in 1977 claimed that Thomas Pynchon was in fact JD Salinger.

Thereafter, the first piece to provide substantial information about Thomas Pynchon's personal life was a biographical account written by a former Cornell University friend, Jules Siegel, and published in Playboy magazine.

Siegel recalls Thomas Pynchon saying he did attend some of Vladimir Nabokov's lectures at Cornell but that he could hardly make out what Nabokov was saying because of his thick Russian accent.

Siegel records Thomas Pynchon's commenting: "Every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength", an observation borne out by the crankiness and zealotry that has attached itself to his name and work in subsequent years.

Thomas Pynchon has published a number of articles and reviews in the mainstream American media, including words of support for Salman Rushdie and his then-wife, Marianne Wiggins, after the fatwa was pronounced against Rushdie by the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Thomas Pynchon insisted that it should be specifically mentioned in the episode that Thomas Pynchon was seen wearing a Roky Erickson T-shirt.

Also during the 1990s, Thomas Pynchon befriended members of the band Lotion and contributed liner notes for the band's 1995 album Nobody's Cool.

Indeed, claims that Thomas Pynchon was the Unabomber or a sympathizer with the Waco Branch Davidians after the 1993 siege were upstaged in the mid-1990s by the invention of an elaborate rumor insinuating that Thomas Pynchon and one "Wanda Tinasky" were the same person.

In 1998, over 120 letters that Thomas Pynchon had written to his longtime agent, Candida Donadio, were donated by the family of a private collector, Carter Burden, to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City.

The cartoon representation of Thomas Pynchon reappears in a third, non-speaking cameo, as a guest at the fictional WordLoaf convention depicted in the 18th season episode "Moe'N'a Lisa".

In celebration of the centenary of George Orwell's birth, Thomas Pynchon wrote a new foreword to Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

On December 6,2006, Thomas Pynchon joined a campaign by many other major authors to clear Ian McEwan of plagiarism charges by sending a typewritten letter to his British publisher, which was published in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

In 2012, Thomas Pynchon's novels were released in e-book format, ending a long holdout by the author.

In 2013, his son, Jackson Thomas Pynchon, graduated from Columbia University, where he was affiliated with St Anthony Hall.

In September 2014, Josh Brolin told The New York Times that Thomas Pynchon had made a cameo in the Inherent Vice film adaptation.

On November 6,2018, Thomas Pynchon was photographed near his apartment in New York's Upper West Side district when he went to vote with his son.