Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon is famously unforthcoming about his private life: in more than a half-century, he has never granted an interview, talked openly about his past, or allowed his photo to be published. However, this has not prevented critics and journalists from assembling a sketch of his life trajectory. Pynchon was born on Long Island to a comfortable middle-class family with aristocratic roots stretching back to 1630s Massachusetts. After a reportedly traumatic upbringing full of family conflict, Pynchon finished high school at 16 and briefly studied engineering physics at Cornell University before leaving for a short stint in the U.S. Navy. Upon returning to Cornell, he switched his major to English, started writing short stories based on his time in the navy, and even tried his hand at writing opera libretti. In the early 1960s, he spent some time sleeping on friends’ couches in New York, until he landed a job as a technical writer for a missile technology project with Boeing in Seattle. As soon as he published his first novel, V. (1963), Pynchon quit Boeing and moved to Mexico City, then to Los Angeles, where he stayed until the early 1970s. Pynchon’s landmark 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which was heavily influenced by his time at Boeing, won him widespread recognition, in addition to a 1974 National Book Award. (Pynchon refused to attend the ceremony and sent comedian Irwin Corey on his behalf.) Pynchon published virtually nothing for the next decade. During this period, he frequently lived on the road, and his identity and location became the subject of widespread speculation in the media—one journalist even tried to hunt him down in an isolated shack in the Northern California woods. Soon after winning a MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 1988, however, Pynchon married his literary agent Melanie Jackson and moved to the Upper West Side of New York City, where he reportedly continues to live and socializes widely with friends and other writers.