His cherishing of privacy, however, also frustrates biographers. Most of the facts known about him pertain to the years before he published
V., his first novel, and although connections can be seen between those facts and features of his work, the scarcity of corroborating biographical details and of statements by Pynchon warrant skepticism about his life's influences on his work. Nevertheless, his training in engineering at Cornell and his work as a writer for Boeing gave him some of the scientific and technological information that he uses in his fiction. Cornell also stimulated the literary side of his temperament. There he took Vladimir Nabokov's course in modern literature and became acquainted with Richard Farina, the young writer whose novel
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me showed promise of brilliance that was cut short by a fatal accident. Pynchon 's work has certain affinities with Nabokov's, such as its references to science and the enormous demands it makes on a reader. Farina's premature death seems to have been the occasion for Pynchon 's meditation on death in
Gravity's Rainbow, which he dedicated to Farina.
Pynchon 's first publication was a short story, "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna," which appeared in Epoch, a journal published at Cornell.
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