SOURCE: A review of Mason and Dixon, in William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. 54, No. 4, October, 1997, pp. 877-9.

In the following review, Gray offers favorable assessment of Mason and Dixon. According to Gray, Pynchon "transforms what might have been a merely amusing historical novel into a moving and profound meditation on the search for truth."

Historians should not read Thomas Pynchon's 733-page novel, Mason and Dixon, for information about the book's main characters, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, the two English astronomers who spent five years (1763–1768) establishing the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania. For that, they will find most of what is known in the brief entries in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. There are, however, other reasons to read Pynchon's bestseller. First, historians will find that, although Pynchon has a penchant for caricature—which yields a Jewish George Washington and a Benjamin Franklin who in ordinary conversation utters...