Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. was born May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, New York to Thomas Pynchon, an industrial surveyor, and Katherine (Bennett) Pynchon. He grew up in the nearby town of Oyster Bay, and received an engineering physics scholarship to Cornell University in 1954. His studies were interrupted by two years of service in the U.S. Navy from 1955 to 1957. When he returned to Cornell, he pursued a liberal arts degree and graduated with a B.A. in 1959.

Pynchon began work on his first novel, V., in 1959 while living in New York City. He moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1960 and worked two years as a technical writer for Boeing Aircraft, then lived in California and Mexico while finishing work on the book. Published in 1963 to great critical acclaim, V. received the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel.

Pynchon’s literary reputation grew with his next two books, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the latter a best-seller and National Book Award winner considered by some critics to be the most important piece of fiction since James Joyce’s Ulysses. His later books Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006) did not enjoy the critical praise of his earlier works, but his status as one of the most important American writers of post-modern fiction remains unchanged.

Starting with the publication of his first novel, Pynchon has shunned publicity, refuses to be photographed, and closely guards his privacy. Little is know about his personal life. In addition to his novels, Pynchon has written essays, reviews, and short stories appearing in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the Kenyon Review, and the Saturday Evening Post. In 1984, he published a collection of his short stories written in the late 1950s and early 1960s titled Slow Learner: Early Stories.

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