It’s time for a screaming to come across the sky…
… time to crack Inherent Vice in a coffee shop, time to trot out V on a train, time to wield Against the Day at work… It’s Pynchon in Public Day!
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As we give ourselves over to the glories of glittering prose, we might send crafty birthday greetings to the man himself; Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. was born on this date in 1937. A MacArthur “Genius” Fellow and National Book Award winner (for Gravity’s Rainbow), Pynchon studied with Nabokov* at Cornell. He is frequently mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The famously camera-shy author as a Cornell student and in a cameo appearance on The Simpsons
* The famously- misdirecting Nabokov later said that he had no memory of Pynchon; but Nabokov’s wife Véra, who graded her husband’s class papers, has reported that she remembered Pynchon’s distinctive handwriting, a mixture of printed and cursive letters.