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The American novelist Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) is best known for V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity's Rainbow, Vineland, and Mason & Dixon, complex fictions noted for their encyclopedic erudition and parodistic, labyrinthine plots. Thomas Ruggle...

Thomas Pynchon 's ancestral roots go deep into the soil of America--an appropriate genealogy for a writer whose overriding concern in his fictional project is the construction of "America" and the necessary conditions for living within that construction....

Thomas Pynchon 's willingness to address the most important cultural and social issues makes him an important writer. He depicts the plight of contemporary humanity caught in, rather than sustained by, a culture that celebrates technology and death rathe...

Monarch Notes 01-01-1963 Summary of The Crying Of Lot 49 The latent paranoia of Herbert Stencil, his belief that all of history is involved in a plot against him, becomes overt in Pynchon's second novel, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). The heroine of...

Thomas Pynchon's novel 'The Crying of Lot 49' has a labyrinthine construction which fits postmodernism. The labyrinths occur in the narration, symbolism and sexual dynamics of the story. The labyrinths combine with puns and prose mazes to fit postmodern language use, in which language...

So where do you find Truly Weird America these days? Does the “Ghost World” exist any more? The Old, Weird America: That was the title of Greil Marcus’ admirably eccentric and illuminating book on the obscure sources of the Basement Tapes; it was the world...

So where do you find Truly Weird America these days? Does the “Ghost World” exist any more?The Old, Weird America: That was the title of Greil Marcus’ admirably eccentric and illuminating book on the obscure sources of the Basement Tapes; it was the world of...

In the following essay, Gleason examines the postmodern attributes and "labyrinthine" structure of The Crying of Lot 49, particularly as found in the novel's indeterminate language, puns, "symbolic landscape, narrative design, and sexual dynamics."

The experiences of the main character—Oedipa Maas—and the reader are too much alike for the main point of [The Crying of Lot 49] to be other than precisely the terrible ambiguity with which it leaves us. (p. 93) [In this book] Pynchon is exploiting the diametrically opposite meanings which "entropy" has in thermodynamics and in information theory. Metaphorically, one compensates the other. Here is the narrator describing the Nefastis Machine, an invention whose structure lies at ...