Life of Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (aka "Pynch")
8 May 1937 Born to Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Sr. and Katherine Frances Bennet Pynchon in Glen Clove, Long Island, NY
1953
Pynchon graduates salutatorian of his class & winner of the Julia L.
Hurston
award for "the senior attaining the highest average in the study of English"
Fall 1953 Pynchon enters Cornell in the division of Engineering Physics
1955 Pynchon enters the Navy
1957 Pynchon returns to Cornell, transfers to the College of Arts and Sciences
March 1959 "The Small Rain" (The Cornell Writer, March 1959) First published short story
June 1959 Pynchon receives B.A. in English with "distinction in all subjects"
Spring 1959 "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (Epoch, Spring 1959)
1960 "Low-lands" (New World Writing, 1960)
February 1960 Publication of "Low-lands" allows
Pynchon to move to Seattle and work for Boeing
(writing technical documents on the ill-fated Bomark guided missile, no
less) while
beginning work on his first novel, V.
Spring 1960 "Entropy" (Kenyon Review, Spring 1960)
May 1961 "Under the Rose" (The Noble Savage, May 1961)
Septmber 1962 Pynchon finishes V. in California and Mexico
1963 V. published, subsequently wins the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best novel of the year
1963ish Work begins on Gravity’s Rainbow (originally titled "Mindless Pleasures")
December 1964 "The Secret Integration" (The Saturday Evening Post, December 19, 1964)
December 1965 "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs.
Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Piecer Inverarity"
(Esquire, December 1965) -- parts of a work in progress
March 1966 "The Shrink Flips" (Cavalier, March 1966)
1966
The Crying of Lot 49, published and subsequently wins the
Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute
of Arts and Letters
12 June 1966 "A Journey into the Mind of Watts" (The New York Times Magazine, June 12, 1966)
1973 Gravity’s Rainbow
1974
Gravity’s Rainbow shares the National Book Award for fiction with
Isaac Bahevis Singer’s
A Crown of Feathers; GR also unanimously selected by judges for
the Pulitzer Prize;
overruled by the Pulitzer advisory board whose members called it "unreadable,"
"turgid,"
"overwritten," and "obscene." No Pulitzer was awarded in 1974 as a result
of the controversy.
1975
Gravity’s Rainbow wins the William Dean Howells Medal of
the American Academy of Arts and Letters (awarded every 5 years to a work
of fiction)
PYNCHON DECLINES THE AWARD in a letter stating, "The Howells Medal is a
great honor,
and, being gold, probably a good hedge against inflation, too. But I don’t
want it.
It makes the Academy look arbitrary and me look rude. . . .I know I should
behave with more class,
but there appears to be only one way to say no, and that’s no."
1975 & beyond Pynchon’s whereabouts uncertain
1984
Slow Learner, a collection of Pynchon’s early short stories, also
including the first autobiographical notes
from the author
1989
Pynchon awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
($310,000 over five years) – credits to this award appear in his two newest
novels.
1990 Vineland
1997
Mason & Dixon
Little weird Pynchon factoid-dealies:
—His days often began at 1p.m. over a bowl of spaghetti and a soft drink, a book on chemistry or physics by his side.
—Gravity’s Rainbow was written in a strange minimalist environment,
for the most part: a cot, a desk, pens,
pad of paper, homemade shelves
with nothing much on them but a book about swine.
—Pynchon was rumored to be J.D. Salinger at various points in the 1970s
and 80s when
information about him became
increasingly scarce.
—The MLA Bibliography suggests the following sources as areas for further
exploring Pynchon’s
Gesamtkunstleben
(my word): Richard Farina, James Bond, William S. Burroughs, James Joyce,
William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot,
W.B. Yeats, Hobbes, Hogarth, science fiction, Vladimir Nabokov
(under whom Pynchon studied
at Cornell), Lewis Carrol, classic spy novels, Ernest Hemingway,
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,
Franz Kafka, Karl Baedeker’s guidebooks, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow,
Herman Melville, Mark Twain,
Kurt Vonnegut, Jospeph Heller (Catch-22), Beat poets/novelists, and Samuel
Beckett.
—Frank D. McConnell writes, "Pynchon, true child of his age, has been influenced profoundly by the 1939 film Wizard of Oz."
—Pynchon is highly passionate about jazz, especially Thelonius Monk.
—Pynchon talked about writing Gravity’s Rainbow: "I was so fucked up
while I was writing it . . . that now I
go back over some of those
sequences and I can’t figure out what I could have meant."
SPERMATIKOS LOGOS A very significant web undertaking by Dr. Larry Daw and A. Ruch
The San Narciso Community College Thomas Pynchon Pages Probably the only other valid resource page out there.
Pynchon, Thomas. Slow Learner: Early Stories. Boston: Little,
Brown and Company, 1984. Contains lengthy,
deconstructive autobiography/notes on the stories by Pynchon himself.
Seed, David. The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon. Iowa
City: University of Iowa Press, 1988. A scholarly
look at Pynchon through a number of texts plus a final chapter that seeks
to construct Pynchon from his
interests in other writers, etc. Listed as "For Further Reading" in the
Norton Anthology, so it MUST be good...
Tanner, Tony. Thomas Pynchon. Contemporary Writers Ser. London:
Metheun and Co., 1982. Includes a great
section about the hyper-removal of the author from his work per Pynchon's
mysterious wraith-like nonpresence.
***One note on my source-seeking. Much of the information that would
go into compiling an autobiographical chronology
simply isn't available for Pynchon, given his problematic elusiveness.
Volumes of critical essays exist, and it is
often through meta-compilations of criticism and a sort of Sherlock-Holmesian
inference that most of the
"facts" of Pynchon come to light. Stil, that is part of the mythical fun
that accompanies our twentieth-century
need to pin this authorial figure down.