Pynchon, Thomas
Pynchon, Thomas ( 1937 – ),American novelist, born on Long Island, New York, and educated at Cornell. His novels are less concerned with character than with the effects of historical and political processes on individual behaviour. Their fragmented picaresque narratives, often based around outlandish quests, blend paranoia, literary game-playing, bawdy humour, social satire, and fantasy: science provides an important source of metaphor and subject matter. He began his first novel while working as a technical writer for the Boeing Aircraft Corporation. This was V ( 1963 ), a long and complex allegorical fable interweaving the picaresque adventures of a group of contemporary Americans with the secret history of a shape-changing spy, ‘V’, who represents a series of female archetypes. The Crying of Lot 49 ( 1966 , UK 1967 ) is a paranoid mystery story mixing philosophical speculation with satirical...
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