Biographical Sketch
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. was born
May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, New York to
Thomas Pynchon, an industrial surveyor, and
Katherine (Bennett) Pynchon. He grew up in the
nearby town of Oyster Bay, and received an engineering physics scholarship to
Cornell University in 1954. His studies were
interrupted by two years of service in the U.S. Navy from
1955 to
1957. When he returned to Cornell, he pursued a liberal
arts degree and graduated with a B.A. in
1959.
Pynchon began work on his first novel,
V., in
1959 while living in New York City. He moved to Seattle,
Washington, in
1960 and worked two years as a technical writer for
Boeing Aircraft, then lived in California and Mexico
while finishing work on the book. Published in
1963 to great critical acclaim,
V. received the
William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first
novel.
Pynchon’s literary reputation grew with his next two books,
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the
latter a best-seller and National Book Award
winner considered by some critics to be the most important piece of fiction
since
James Joyce’s
Ulysses. His later books
Vineland (1990),
Mason & Dixon (1997), and
Against the Day (2006)
did not enjoy the critical praise of his earlier
works, but his status as one of the most important American writers of
post-modern fiction remains unchanged.
Starting with the publication of his first novel, Pynchon has shunned
publicity, refuses to be photographed, and closely guards his privacy. Little
is know about his personal life. In addition to his novels, Pynchon has written
essays, reviews, and short stories appearing in publications such as the
New York Times Book Review,
New York Times Magazine, the
New York Review of Books, the
Kenyon Review, and the
Saturday Evening Post. In
1984, he published a collection of his short stories written
in the late
1950s and early
1960s titled
Slow Learner: Early Stories.
Source:
Thomas Pynchon.
Contemporary Literary Criticism Online,
http://galenet.galegroup.com (accessed
9 January 2008)