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From: bals@nutmeg.DEC (Once, accident. Twice, coincidence. Three times is enemy action.)
Newsgroups: net.books
Subject: More on Pynchon
Message-ID: <1341@decwrl.DEC.COM>
Date: Mon, 24-Feb-86 15:08:00 EST
Article-I.D.: decwrl.1341
Posted: Mon Feb 24 15:08:00 1986
Date-Received: Wed, 26-Feb-86 07:19:59 EST
Sender: daemon@decwrl.DEC.COM
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation
Lines: 51

>Thomas Pynchon is a rather mysterious figure posing as a respectable
>author... 
 
>There is a Thomas Pynchon who went to school at Columbia and who was
>in the Navy, but no records of him were found (I actually heard some
>records were misplaced in a freak break-in accident...)
>Newsweek once ran a picture of him (at my school even that specific 
>3 or 4 year old copy of Newsweek disappeared from the stacks!) 
 
>To this day he has been seen by no one but his publisher, and an English
>Professor once told me of someone hiring a Private Investigator to
>find out who communicated with the publisher and the P.I. found out
>even the Publisher's Executive Secretary didn't know who Pynchon was
>(and had never heard of the name, presumably due to the 
>variations in aliases...)
                                 
Information on Pynchon himself is indeed slim, but not to the extent that
the excerpts above make it out to be (my apologies for not including your
name with the excerpts, I accidently deleted it). Pynchon is a graduate of 
Cornell (not Columbia). He was a contemporary of Richard Farina ("Been Down 
So long It Looks Like Up to Me") "Gravity's Rainbow" is dedicated to Farina. 
Contrary to the apocryphal story above that "no one has seen Pynchon but his 
publisher" *many* people have seen/known Pynchon, including such public 
figures as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Vladimir Nabokov (Pynchon attended his 
writing class at Cornell). Also, many of Pynchon's "non-public" friends
are named in "Gravity's Rainbow." 

After a stint in the Navy (which he evidently enjoyed, if V is any 
indication), Pynchon lived in Seattle and worked for Boeing Aircraft.
Yoyodyne is at least partially based on Boeing.

Pynchon now lives somewhere beteween Seattle and Mexico City. He's
believed to spend most of his time in Mexico. There *is* one known
photograph of Pynchon, taken when he was at Cornell. He is also known 
to have enjoyed cold spaghetti for breakfast while at Cornell.

When Pynchon was awarded the American Book Award, he sent the comedian,
"Professor" Irwin Corey to accept. Corey was introduced as Pynchon at
the ceremony, and had most of the crowd convinced that he was indeed
Pynchon.

There is a good description of, and story about, Pynchon in
Farina's posthumous collection, "Long Time Coming ..." 

The judges for the Pulitzer Prize refused to consider "Gravity's Rainbow"
due, they said, to "the book's obscenity and incomprehensibility."

Thomas Pynchon is reportedly working on a novel about the Mason-Dixon line.
Somehow, that makes sense.

Fred Bals (DEC - Merrimack)