Indeed, as Louis Mackey and others have shown, any complete reading of Pynchon 's fiction must consider its American Puritan context.
Many readers of American literature have first encountered the Pynchon name in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables (1851)--in which it is spelled "Pyncheon." Two members of the family wrote to Hawthorne to complain about his characterization of their ancestors. One of these disgruntled readers was the Reverend Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, who eventually became the ninth president of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. This nineteenth-century namesake of the present Pynchon is also a worthy literary precursor. In his teaching and scholarship at Trinity, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon examined both science and religion, while another of the twentieth-century Pynchon's thematic preoccupations is the interpenetration of science and scientific theory in late twentieth-century life. Although Thomas Ruggles Pynchon apparently did not concern himself with Thomas Pynchon 's favorite nineteenth-century scientific concept, entropy, the Reverend Pynchon's writings do suggest a family predisposition to an interest in science.
A third branch of the family is connected to the once-prosperous stock brokerage firm Pynchon and Company.
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