Thomas Pynchon (Cyclopedia of World Authors)
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon (PIHN-chuhn), Jr., is the most controversial, the most discussed, and the most mysterious of the post-World War II writers who pioneered what is called metafiction (roughly, any fiction that calls attention to its fictive nature). Descended from eminent Massachusetts Puritans and raised in a conventional upper-middle-class Long Island family, Pynchon attended Cornell University as a student in engineering physics, left to serve a hitch in the Navy, and returned to graduate with a degree in English in 1959. He wrote his first stories while at Cornell. He worked as...
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