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...

DON'T MIND admitting that I was one of those long-suffering readers who eagerly awaited Thomas Pynchon's new novel. Gravity's now, Pynchon's 1973 epic, was a daunting, compelling work, full of lapel-clutching intimidation, lapinfrom-chapeau hocus-pocus, and fascinating tonal leap froggings-a Nazi opera conducted by...

Vineland-a multimedia semithriller, a Star Wars for the counterculture-is easier to read than anything else by Thomas Pynchon except The Crying of Lot 49. Like Crying, it's a brief for the disinherited and dispossessed, the outlaws and outcasts of an underground America. Also...

Residents in the rural New Jersey community of Vineland are used to seeing wild turkey, the occasional deer and once in a great while, even a bear. But reports that a black panther has been roaming the woods have some people worried.Residents over the weekend...

If you think the credit crisis is someone else's problem, just look at what is going on in Florida — where plenty of people seemingly far removed from the financial turmoil have been hard hit by its impact.Nothing illustrates that more than the decision last...

In the following essay, Wilde examines the major themes, narrative presentation, and parody in Vineland. Citing the problem of indeterminacy and equivocation in the novel, Wilde contends that "Vineland seems from time to time to become what it beholds; a busy, pop version of America more attentive to momentary surfaces than to depth."

In the following essay, Cowart examines Pynchon's mytho-historical perspective in Vineland, drawing comparison between the literary aesthetics of Pynchon and James Joyce.

In the following review, Powers offers a positive evaluation of Vineland.