Thomas Pynchon


Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr was born to Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. and Katherine Frances Bennett Pynchon on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York. They moved to East Norwich when Thomas, Jr was just a child. His father became town supervisor of Oyster Bay and later an industrial surveyor. He has two siblings, sister, Judith and brother, John.

He graduated from Oyster Bay High School in 1953 at the age of sixteen, salutatorian of his class and winner of the Julia L. Thurston award for "the senior attaining the highest average in the study of English." A scholarship to Cornell University and enrollment in the division of Engineering Physics followed. At the end of his sophomore year he left Cornell for service in the Navy.

He returned to Cornell in the fall of 1957 transferring to the College of Arts an Sciences from which he would attain his degree in English. During this time, he took a course from Vladimir Nabokov, was on the editorial staff of the The Cornell Writer , and also published his first short story: "The Small Rain" (The Cornell Writer, March 1959). He received his B.A. in June of 1959 with "distinction in all subjects."

Publication of many other short stories followed: "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (Epoch, Spring 1959), "Low-lands" (New World Writing, 1960), "Entropy" (Kenyon Review, Spring 1960), and "Under the Rose" (The Noble Savage, May 1961). Upon graduation, Pynchon had many options including, several fellowships (a Woodrow Wilson for one), teaching creative writing at Cornell, becoming a disk jockey, and consideration as a film critic for Esquire.

Instead, he began work on his first novel, V., while in New York and, with the money from the publishing of "Low-lands" making the trip possible, later in Seattle during a job with the Boeing Company. He worked there as an "engineering aide" writing technical documents from February 2, 1960 to September 13, 1962. He finished V. in California and Mexico, and it was published in 1963. It won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel of the year.

The publishing of a short story, "The Secret Integration" (The Saturday Evening Post, December 19, 1964) and parts of a work in progress "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity" (Esquire, December 1965) and "The Shrink Flips" (Cavalier, March 1966) followed. His second "novel", The Crying of Lot 49, was published in 1966 and won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

He wrote "A Journey into the Mind of Watts" for The New York Times Magazine (June 12, 1966), and, as his success in avoiding any public exposure (heh, heh) continued for the next seven years, he worked on Gravity's Rainbow which was finally published in 1973. In 1974, it shared the National Book Award for Fiction with 01. Many of Clarke's short tales relate to the world of her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.