Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49

About Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) is Thomas Pynchon's shortest and most accessible novel — a 150-page concentrated demonstration of his themes (conspiracy, entropy, paranoia, the hidden order beneath surface America) that serves as the ideal entry point to one of the major American writers of the twentieth century. Oedipa Maas, named executor of her former lover's estate, discovers possible evidence of the Tristero, a centuries-old underground postal network competing with official mail systems. Whether the conspiracy is real or a hallucination is left unanswered. The novel is the only Pynchon that does not require a companion guide and the one most commonly assigned in American literature courses as a first Pynchon. It stands alone as a complete work while functioning as the best preparation for Gravity's Rainbow.