Pynchon, Thomas (1937—)
Though a difficult literary author who has written only five novels in 35 years, Thomas Pynchon has remained a figure who has captured the imagination of a wider public ...
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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 erudi...
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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...
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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 nec...
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Critical Essay by John Vernon
Chance meetings in Pynchon's novels are exploited as parodies of realism by being accepted as part of the normal, necessary order of events. A line of action that...
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Critical Essay by Gore Vidal
I find it admirable that of the nonacademics Pynchon did not follow the usual lazy course of going for tenure as did so many writers—no, "writers"&#x...
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Critical Essay by James Rother
[Let] us postulate one overriding function of this contraption called V., namely to call attention to history not as a nightmare from which we're trying to awake...
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Critical Essay by Robert Martin Adams
On its surface, V is an incredibly active novel, with an immense cast of characters as vigorously in motion as a swarm of paramecia in a drop of swamp-water. The...
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Critical Essay by Alfred Mac Adam
When we read a Pynchon text we may be disconcerted by it, but we usually find ourselves comfortable with at least one of its elements: setting. In fact, Pynchon�...
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Critical Essay by Richard Poirier
In Pynchon's novels the plots of wholly imagined fiction are inseparable from the plots of known history or science. More than that, he proposes that any effo...
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Critical Essay by W. T. Lhamon, Jr.
Pynchon's verbal complexities astound and confound, amaze and bewilder, because his mixed modes concern the ultimate formlessness of a world that for a deca...
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Critical Essay by William M. Plater
The image of the artist alone in his room is a familiar one, almost mandatory for any contemporary writer suspected of self-conscious narration. Pynchon does not d...
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Critical Essay by Douglas Fowler
Many who have written on Pynchon seem much too anxious to present him as a humanistic novelist with redeeming social concerns, although they allow that he sometimes s...
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I ought to be writing about Thomas Pynchon. His gargantuan new novel. But I’ve lost confidence in Mr. Pynchon, who hasn’t written a good book since Gravity’s Rainbow, 33 years ago...
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I ought to be writing about Thomas Pynchon. His gargantuan new novel. But I’ve lost confidence in Mr. Pynchon, who hasn’t written a good book since Gravity’s Rainbow, 33 years ag...
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Don't expect a lot of sunshine in Oprah Winfrey's latest book club pick. Publishing's leading hit-maker has chosen Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," a bleak, apocalyptic novel by an author who rarely t...
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gasp) socialize with their fellow New Yorkers. These hipsters tend to congregate in the southwest corner of the pool courtyard, isolating themselves from the splashing local families. They read tr...
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Time to rewrite the history of contemporary journalism? Most recent discussion of that history has been about the New Journalism, the New New Journalism, memoir fictionalizing and “truthiness...
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Time to rewrite the history of contemporary journalism? Most recent discussion of that history has been about the New Journalism, the New New Journalism, memoir fictionalizing and “truthiness...
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Pynchon, Thomas (1937—)
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas (Ruggles) Pynchon, (Jr.)
Critical Essay by John Vernon
Scrumptious Pastiche For the Well-Read Cook
