Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., american novelist. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent 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), Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997) and Against the Day (2006) , complex fictions noted for their encyclopedic erudition and parodistic, labyrinthine plots.

Pynchon is a MacArthur Fellow and a recipient of the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Both his fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, styles and themes, including (but not limited to) the fields of history, science and mathematics. Pynchon is also known for his avoidance of personal publicity: very few photographs of him have ever been published, and rumours about his location and identity have been circulated since the 1960s.

Thomas Pynchon was born on May 8, 1937, in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, of a prominent family, one of three children of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. (1907–1995) and Katherine Frances Bennett (1909–1996). Among Pynchon's ancestors were a 16th-century London high sheriff, a 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony patentee and treasurer who was also a founder of both Roxbury and Springfield, Massachusetts, and a 19th-century Trinity College president, after whom Pynchon was named by his father, Thomas Sr., an industrial surveyor in East Norwich, New York.

Pynchon's family background and aspects of his ancestry have provided source material for his fictions, particularly in the Slothrop family histories related in the short story "The Secret Integration" (1964) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973).

Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School, where he was awarded 'student of the year' and contributed short fictional pieces to his school newspaper. These juvenilia incorporated some of the literary motifs and recurring subject matter he would use throughout his career: oddball names, sophomoric humour, illicit drug use and paranoia.

After graduating from high school in 1953 at the age of 16, Pynchon studied engineering physics at Cornell University, but left at the end of his second year to serve in the U.S. Navy. Pynchon's early academic interest and excellence in the sciences was evident later in his fiction, where scientific theories serve as suggestive and complex metaphors.

In 1957, he returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English. His first published story, "The Small Rain", appeared in the Cornell Writer in May 1959, and narrates an actual experience of a friend who had served in the army; subsequently, however, episodes and characters throughout Pynchon's fiction draw freely upon his own experiences in the navy.

While at Cornell, Pynchon started his life-long friendship with Richard Fariña; Pynchon would go on to dedicate Gravity's Rainbow to Fariña, as well as serve as his best man and as his pallbearer. Together the two briefly led what Pynchon has called a 'micro-cult' around Oakley Hall's 1958 novel Warlock. (Pynchon later reminisced about his college days in the introduction he wrote in 1983 for Fariña's novel Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, first published in 1966.)

Reportedly he attended lectures given by Vladimir Nabokov, who then taught literature at Cornell. While Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon (although Nabokov's wife, Véra, who graded her husband's class papers, commented that she remembered his distinctive handwriting - comprised of a mixture of printed and cursive letters), other teachers at Cornell, such as the novelist James McConkey, recall him as being a gifted and exceptional student. In 1958, Pynchon and Cornell classmate Kirkpatrick Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical, Minstral Island, which portrayed a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world. Pynchon received his BA in June 1959.

After leaving Cornell, Pynchon began to work on his first novel. 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. When published in 1963, V. won a William Faulkner Foundation Award for the best first novel of the year.

After resigning from Boeing, Pynchon spent some 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, as he was composing his most highly regarded work, Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon during this time flirted with the lifestyle and some of the habits of the hippie counterculture; however, his retrospective assessment of the motives, values and achievements of the student and youth milieux of the period, in his 1984 "Introduction" to the Slow Learner collection of early stories and the novel Vineland (1990) in particular, is equivocal at best.

In 1964, an application to study mathematics as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, was turned down. In 1966, Pynchon wrote a first-hand report on the aftermath and legacy of the Watts riots in Los Angeles. Entitled "A Journey Into the Mind of Watts," the article was published in the New York Times Magazine.

Along with its emphasis on loftier themes such as racism, imperialism and religion, and its cognizance and appropriation of many elements of traditional high culture and literary form, Pynchon's work also demonstrates a strong affinity with the practitioners and artifacts of low culture, including comic books and cartoons, pulp fiction, popular films, television programs, cookery, urban myths, conspiracy theories, and folk art. This blurring of the conventional boundary between "High" and "low" culture, sometimes interpreted as a "deconstruction", is seen as one of the defining characteristics of postmodernism.

In particular, Pynchon has revealed himself in his fiction and non-fiction as an aficionado of popular music. Song lyrics and mock musical numbers appear in each of his novels, and, in his autobiographical introduction to the Slow Learner collection of early stories, he reveals a fondness for both jazz and rock and roll.

A diffuse and discontinuous fiction, V. comprises two, essentially alternating, tales. The first, the picaresque adventures of Benny Profane, a passive drifter just discharged from the Navy who "yo-yos" from place to place principally in the eastern United States in late 1955 and 1956. The second, Herbert Stencil's imagined, sprawling, historical narrative of V., the mysterious woman whom Stencil believes to be connected in some way to the 20th century's apocalyptic meaning and whose narrative ranges from 1898 Egypt to 1922 South-West Africa. The two narratives enclose a kind of polar vision of possibilities: the random disorder of Profane's present and the compulsive order of Stencil's past. Yet Pynchon's text refused to take itself seriously; both Stencil and Profane are comic, self-mocking characters, and their respective quest and non-quest function as parodies that ridicule such totalizing extremes.

Investigations and digressions into the realms of human sexuality, psychology, sociology, mathematics, science, and technology recur throughout Pynchon's works. One of his earliest short stories, "Low-lands" (1960), features a meditation on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a metaphor for telling stories about one's own experiences. His next published work, "Entropy" (1960), introduced the concept which was to become synonymous with Pynchon's name (though Pynchon later admitted the "shallowness of [his] understanding" of the subject, and noted that choosing an abstract concept first and trying to construct a narrative around it was "a lousy way to go about writing a story").

Another early story, "Under the Rose" (1961), includes amongst its cast of characters a cyborg set anachronistically in Victorian-era Egypt (a type of writing now called steampunk). This story, significantly reworked by Pynchon, appears as Chapter 3 of V.. "The Secret Integration" (1964), Pynchon's last published short story, is a sensitively-handled coming-of-age tale in which a group of young boys face the consequences of the American policy of racial integration. At one point in the story, the boys attempt to understand the new policy by way of the mathematical operation, the only sense of the word with which they are familiar.

Pynchon's second book, The Crying of Lot 49, won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and alludes to entropy and communication theory, and contains scenes and descriptions which parody or appropriate calculus, Zeno's paradoxes, and the thought experiment known as Maxwell's demon. At the same time, the novel also investigates homosexuality, celibacy and both medically-sanctioned and illicit psychedelic drug use. Gravity's Rainbow describes many varieties of sexual fetishism (including sado-masochism, coprophilia and a borderline case of tentacle rape), and features numerous episodes of drug use, most notably marijuana but also cocaine, naturally occurring hallucinogens, and the mushroom Amanita muscaria.

Unlike V., The Crying of Lot 49 is a tightly plotted narrative focusing on a single protagonist, California housewife Oedipa Maas. Oedipa is named executrix of a former lover's wealthy estate and during the course of attempting to disentangle it is herself entangled in evidence of the apparent existence of a secret, subversive postal organization named the Tristero. Oedipa's quest for the Tristero, whose origins date back to 16th-century Europe, becomes increasingly obsessive, and while the narrative implies that she may be paranoid, her search leads to encounters with a variety of equally obsessed, comic characters. At the end of the narrative Oedipa awaits definitive proof of the Tristero's existence at an auction, uncertain of the eventual outcome but having emerged from her previous insularity and ignorance.

Gravity's Rainbow also derives much from Pynchon's background in mathematics: at one point, the geometry of garter belts is compared with that of cathedral spires, both described as mathematical singularities.

Gravity's Rainbow may deservedly be called Pynchon's magnum opus and, along with Moby Dick, one of America's great fictions. The book is an impressive and bewildering labyrinth of characters and settings, plots and styles. Taking place primarily in England, France, and Germany near the end of World War II, Gravity's Rainbow traces the quest of American Tyrone Slothrop to learn the truth of his secret infant conditioning by scientist Laszlo Jamf of the German firm IG Farben. The central character of Gravity's Rainbow, however, is not Slothrop, nor is it even human. It is the inanimate German V-2 rocket, connected to Slothrop by virtue of his conditioning and fetishized by virtually all the book's characters. At the book's end Slothrop "scatters" as a character and a special V-2, the 00000, fails to escape gravity, killing a sacrificial German boy launched with it.

The literary importance of Gravity's Rainbow is beyond dispute. It shared the National Book Award for fiction with a collection of stories by I. B. Singer and won the Howells Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (which Pynchon declined). Gravity's Rainbow was also nominated for but "lost" the Pulitzer Prize when the advisory board rejected the original committee's unanimous decision on the grounds that the book was "turgid," "overwritten," "obscene," and "unreadable." Despite the negative publicity, critics continued to associate it favorably with such books as Ulysses and have come to regard it with similar respect and admiration.

Nearly 17 years elapsed between the publication of Gravity's Rainbow and Pynchon's next novel, Vineland. On one level the title of this work alludes to America as it was discovered by Leif Ericson prior to the arrival of Columbus. It also refers to a fictitious county on the northern coast of California, the state's last uncharted wilderness. In the 1980s Vineland serves as a refuge for middle-aged veterans of the 1960s counterculture who have sought refuge from government repression. The novel focuses primarily on Prairie Wheeler's search for her long-lost mother, Frenesi Gates, a beautiful former member of a defunct radical group dedicated to exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of the Nixon administration. Although the novel contains many subplots and characters, combining elements of soap opera and political thriller, it is generally considered less ambitious in scope, thematic complexity, and historical range than Pynchon's earlier works.

Mason & Dixon explores the scientific, theological, and socio-cultural foundations of the Age of Reason whilst 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.

Referred to as "the best 18th-century novel anyone has written in a long time," Mason & Dixon garnered wide critical praise when it was published in 1997. In addition to displaying Pynchon's patented multiple plots and encyclopedic knowledge in a dozen disciplines, it was generally recognized that this novel was at once darker and more humane than the novelist's previous work. The central narrative re-imagines the lives of two historical figures, astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon, who were hired by the Royal Society in 1764 to settle the boundary dispute between Maryland and Pennsylvania and who created the famous Mason-Dixon line dividing the yet-to-be-born nation into North and South, free states and slave states. Appearing in the novel along with the real characters of George Washington, Ben Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson are a large cast of human, animal, and mechanical fictional characters, including a Chinese martial arts expert, a talking dog, and an amorous mechanical duck. Pynchon's most consciously literary novel, Mason & Dixon contains echoes of Kipling, Kafka, Lawrence, Conrad, Hawthorne, Melville, and Twain.

An article published in the Soho Weekly News claimed that Pynchon was in fact J. D. Salinger. Pynchon's written response to this theory was simple: "Not bad. Keep trying." Thereafter, the first piece to provide substantial information about Pynchon's personal life was a biographical account written by a former Cornell University friend, Jules Siegel, and published in Playboy magazine. In his article, Siegel reveals that Pynchon had a complex about his teeth and underwent extensive and painful reconstructive surgery, was nicknamed "Tom" at Cornell and attended Mass diligently, acted as best man at Siegel's wedding, and that he later also had an affair with Siegel's wife.

Pynchon's avoidance of celebrity and public appearances caused journalists to continue to speculate about his identity and activities, and reinforced his reputation within the media as "reclusive". More astute readers and critics recognized that there were and are perhaps aesthetic (and ideological) motivations behind his choice to remain aloof from public life.

As biographical information on Pynchon is limited, the literary world was excited when 120 letters the author wrote to former agent Candida Donadio became public in 1998. The New York Times published excerpts from the letters which gave new insight into Pynchon as a young author. Donadio sold the letters in 1994 for $45,000 to Carter Burden, a collector. After Burden's death, his family donated the letters and other literary works in his collection to New York's Pierpont Morgan Library in 1996. The library gave the New York Times access to the letters.

Belying this reputation somewhat, 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. In the following year, Rushdie's enthusiastic review of Pynchon's Vineland prompted Pynchon to send him another message hinting that if Rushdie were ever in New York, the two should arrange a meeting. Eventually, the two did meet, and Rushdie found himself surprised by how much Pynchon resembled the mental image Rushdie had formed beforehand.

In the early 1990s, Pynchon married his literary agent, Melanie Jackson — a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt — and fathered a son, Jackson, in 1991. The disclosure of Pynchon's location in New York, after many years in which he was believed to be dividing his time between Mexico and northern California, led some journalists and photographers to try to track him down.

Shortly before the publication of Mason & Dixon in 1997, a CNN camera crew filmed him in Manhattan. Angered by this invasion of his privacy, he rang CNN asking that he not be identified in the footage of the street scenes near his home.

As well as fictional works, Pynchon has written essays, introductions, and reviews addressing subjects as diverse as missile security, the Watts Riots, Luddism and the work of Donald Barthelme. Some of his non-fiction pieces have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books, and he has contributed blurbs for books and records. His 1984 Introduction to the Slow Learner collection of early stories is significant for its autobiographical candour. He has written introductions to at least three books, including the 1992 collection of Donald Barthelme's stories,The Teachings of Don B. and, more recently, the Penguin Centenary Edition of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was published in 2003, and the Penguin Classics edition of Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me written by Pynchon's close friend, Richard Fariña, and first published in 1966.

Rumored to live in California, Mexico, and most recently, New York City, Pynchon has remained reclusive and largely unknown, but his reputation as a significant American writer is assured.

Selected works:

• V. (March, 1963).
• The Crying of Lot 49 (April 27, 1966).
• Gravity's Rainbow (February 28, 1973), 1974 National Book Award for fiction, judges' unanimous selection for Pulitzer Prize overruled by advisory board, awarded William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1975 (award declined)
• Slow Learner (April, 1984), collection of early short stories
• Vineland (February, 1990)
• Mason & Dixon (April 30, 1997)
• Against the Day (November 21, 2006)
• Inherent Vice (August 4, 2009)

Bibliography about Thomas Pynchon:

• Signs and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World, by Peter Cooper, 1983
• Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, by Molly Hite, 1983
• Thomas Pynchon, by Tony Tanner, 1982
• Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity, by Thomas Hill Schaub, 1981
• Critical Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. by Richard Pearce, 1981
• The Rainbow Quest of Thomas Pynchon, by Douglas Mackey, 1980
• Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion, by David Cowart, 1980
• Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Edward Mendelson, 1978
• The Grim Phoenix: Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon, by William Plater, 1978
• Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon , ed. by George Levine and David Leverenz, 1976
• Thomas Pynchon, by Joseph Slade, 1974