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17 unusual facts about Thomas Pynchon


Anti-romance

J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye is probably the most famous and successful anti-romance, though there are many others, including Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, "Araby" by James Joyce and Joseph Heller's Catch-22.

Boonville, California

Some commentators believe Boonville may be the setting for the novel Vineland (1990) by Thomas Pynchon.

Cassiber

After Harth left they recorded two more albums, Perfect Worlds (1986) and A Face We All Know (1990), the latter dealing with issues surrounding the collapse of the Berlin Wall and incorporating texts from Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow.

Hair's breadth

In Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon invoked "a gnat's ass or red cunt hair" as images of very small units.

Hollywood Black Friday

Thomas Pynchon later would use some of these events as backstory in his novel Vineland.

Hysterical realism

Wood points to Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon as the forefathers of the genre, which continues in writers like David Foster Wallace and Salman Rushdie.

Iceland spar

Thomas Pynchon refers to the doubling property of Iceland spar in his 2006 novel Against the Day.

Jeremiah Dixon

Jeremiah Dixon is one of the two titular characters of Thomas Pynchon's 1997 novel Mason & Dixon.

Kennelly–Heaviside layer

In Thomas Pynchon's 1964 short story "The Secret Integration," a boy's dreams are affected "when the thing in the sky, the Heaviside layer, was right for it."

Little Albert experiment

In Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, the Infant Tyrone's penile erections are conditioned in a manner modeled on Watson and Rayner's conditioning of Little Albert, to both satirize behaviorism and wind the book's plot around Pynchon's themes of control and the institutional corruption of innocence.

Martín Fierro

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Gravity's Rainbow, a group of Argentine anarchists led by Francisco Squalidozzi collaborate with a German filmmaker, Gerhardt von Göll, to create a film version of Martín Fierro.

Metempsychosis

In Thomas Pynchon's 1963 premiere novel V., metempsychosis is mentioned in reference to the book "The Search for Bridey Murphy" by Morey Bernstein.

Philip Best

In 1998 Best published his doctoral thesis at Durham University entitled "Apocalypticism in the Fiction of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon" and later received a doctorate in English literature.

Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space

The creators admit that one of the film's central plot points, about a cult operating as a postal service and corporate monopoly, is influenced and adapted from Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49.

The Jazz Butcher

Their oeuvre is blackly humorous with such topics as Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, an unrequited crush on Shirley MacLaine, and an ode to SF writer Harlan Ellison.

What's Become of Waring

Waring, anticipating Thomas Pynchon in his insistence on privacy and anonymity, is soon confirmed dead.

Youghiogheny River

"Youghiogheny, Pennsylvania," is mentioned in a Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show, and the Youghiogheny is referred to as Yochio Geni in Thomas Pynchon's novel Mason & Dixon.


David Musgrave

He is a descendant of William Witter and Hannah Churchman of Boston, whose descendents include Thomas Pynchon, Archibald MacLeish, Katharine Hepburn and the poets Francis Goddard Tuckerman and Henry Theodore Tuckerman.

Epworth League

In Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, a saucy secretary tells St. Cosmo, who has entered the office after-hours, that "'this place ain't the Epworth League.'"

Harper Perennial

Harper Perennial Modern Classics, a direct offshoot of the imprint, publishes eminent authors such as Peter Singer, Harper Lee, Zora Neale Hurston, Aldous Huxley, Russell Banks, Thomas Pynchon, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sylvia Plath, and Thornton Wilder among many others.

Jules Siegel

His articles about Brian Wilson, Bob Dylan, Thomas Pynchon and other prominent Americans were primary (and often unique) sources of information based on his personal acquaintance and extensive direct interviews with the subjects.

McClintic Sphere

McClintic Sphere is a fictional character in the novel V. by Thomas Pynchon.

Mirosław Nahacz

He admitted that in his writing he was influenced by the literature of Céline, Hrabal, Burroughs and Pynchon.

New World Writing

The first Lippincott volume, 16, was led off by Tillie Olsen's most famous story "Tell Me a Riddle" and included Thomas Pynchon's "Low-Lands"; New World Writing 17 (1960) included John Updike's "The Sea's Green Sameness", James Purdy's "Daddy Wolf", an essay by Otto Friedrich on Ezra Pound and Louise W. King's first published story, "The Day We Were Mostly Butterflies."

Resistentialism

Thomas Pynchon's novel V. examines resistentialism through the character of Benny Profane, who is under the impression that he can only deal successfully with animate objects.

The Blow Out

Thomas Pynchon refers to the cartoon involving "Porky Pig and the anarchist" several times in his novels The Crying of Lot 49 (Vintage, 2000, p63) and Gravity's Rainbow.

Wanda Tinasky

In 1990, Bruce Anderson, the editor of the AVA, read Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, a novel set in northern California.

Woman in the Moon

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, which deals with the V-2 rockets, refers to this, along with several other classic German silent films.