Having breathed New York's air for more than two decades, half a century after his childhood in Glen Cove, Long Island — a 90 minute train ride away from Penn Station — Pynchon certainly knows the city well. But by placing his novel so close to home, he draws a rare sort of attention to himself, to the environment where he happens to write and live, to his fraught relationship with his surroundings. This is an odd feat for a so-called recluse, especially a literary one, to attempt.

He has, of course, hidden pretty well among a city of 8.2 million people during a time when he has accumulated admirers (and hanger-ons), racked up literary awards, inspired controversy after controversy over his secrecy, raised a family, and even appeared, in voice only, on The Simpsons. Like so many other New Yorkers, he has lived a fairly normal life — unlike Jonathan Franzen, Pynchon never appeared on the cover of Time — while maintaining a subtle but powerful influence over the country's broader culture. It seems urgent, then, to figure out where Pynchon fits into it. And who, of course, Pynchon really is.

Who is Thomas Pynchon?

For a certain member of New York’s literary set, it may not come as a surprise that Thomas Pynchon is difficult to track down. Efforts to do so seem at once pointless and invasive, yet also fascinating, given the amount of energy their subject spends escaping the roving eyes of reporters. There are just four extant photos of him as an adult; two, at most, are recognizably Pynchon. According to Bling Ring author Nancy Jo Sales, who used a publicly-available directory to find his Manhattan apartment in 1997, Pynchon’s associates and friends almost always decline to comment on his whereabouts, apparently for fear of being cut off by him.

Locating the man, for the average person, is next to impossible. The same goes for his family members, even those who aren't exactly hiding in the shadows. For example, his wife, Melanie Jackson, operates a literary agency on 72nd Street in a building known, improbably, as The Hermitage. But when we showed up a few weeks ago, the building’s doorman indicated that Jackson does not take visitors without an appointment. When we tried to schedule one, Jackson’s secretary refused to do so, citing her boss’s policy of not granting interviews, on- or off-the-record, to reporters.

Pynchon’s early origins are less than mysterious, however. Thomas Ruggles Pynchon was born in Nassau County in 1937; attended Cornell for two years before enlisting in the Navy, which took him to Italy; returned to Cornell to graduate in 1959 (see picture at right); and later drafted V. while editing technical manuals for Boeing in Seattle. Following V.’s publication in 1963, he darted across North America — fans spotted him in Manhattan Beach; Berkeley; and, according to The New York Times, an undisclosed location in Mexico — before reappearing, supposedly for good, in New York, where he married Jackson, who had been his literary agent since 1983. Together they had a son, Jackson Pynchon, who graduated from Columbia University last month.