Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

About Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon is the most elusive and formally radical of the major American postmodern novelists — a novelist who has given no interviews, appeared in no photographs since his early twenties, and constructed a body of work of extraordinary density and ambition. V. (1963), his debut, established the conspiracy and entropy themes he would develop across his career; The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) distilled them into 150 concentrated pages; Gravity's Rainbow (1973), recommended for the Pulitzer before the board overturned the jury's decision, spent 760 pages on the final months of World War II and the physics and mythology of the V-2 rocket. Mason & Dixon (1997) applied his methods to eighteenth-century American history; Against the Day (2006) expanded to 1085 pages around the 1893 World's Fair and the years through World War I. Inherent Vice (2009) was his most accessible novel — a stoner detective story set in 1970 Los Angeles that was adapted by Paul Thomas Anderson.