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.
[…] Thomas Pynchon is having a moment. On the heels of the success of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (loosely based in Pynchon’s novel, Vineland), he has released his first novel in 12 years, Shadow Ticket, a sufficiently big deal to merit not just a featured focus in The New York Times Book Review, but also a combo review-profile in The New York Times Magazine (both links to gift articles). Your correspondent is about half-way through Shadow Ticket and having a blast… […]
Is It OK To Be A Luddite? Thomas Pynchon answers
November 1, 2025 at 12:17 pm