Thomas Pynchon (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
Biography
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., descendant of an early New England Puritan family, was born and raised in a middle-class Long Island suburb. His first known literary works were satiric essays published in the literary magazine of Oyster Bay High School, from which he graduated in 1953. He enrolled at Cornell University in that year, majoring in engineering physics. His college career was interrupted by a two-year hitch in the U.S. Navy; he returned to Cornell and graduated in 1959. While at Cornell, he took writing courses from the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was...
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