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Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist. He is known for his dense, complex works of postmodern fiction, which are distinguished by their paranoid tone, absurd humor, and references to history, art, science, and popular culture. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists. Pynchon is notoriously reclusive. Few photographs of him have been published, and rumors about…
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culture · American novelist (born 1937) · writer · novelist · essayist · science fiction writer · also Thomas Pynchon, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., Pynchon
Born 8 May 1937 · Q35155
69 published statements · 0 followers
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You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time that his father is not a god, not even a oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such father. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairly tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.
I want to break out — to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become....
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“You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time that his father is not a god, not even a oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such father. So Vheissu becomes a bedtime story or fairly tale after all, and the boy a superior version of his merely human father.”
“I want to break out — to leave this cycle of infection and death. I want to be taken in love: so taken that you and I, and death, and life, will be gathered inseparable, into the radiance of what we would become....”
“I was dreaming … about my grandfather. A very old man, at least as old as I am now, 91. I thought, when I was a boy, that he had been 91 all his life. Now I feel as if I have been 91 all my life.”
“We simply grow up. In Florence, at age fifty-four, I was a brash youth. Had I known the Duse was there her poet chap might have found dangerous competition, ha-ha. The only trouble is that now, nearing eighty, I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to, utilized, exploited. No time for pranks. No more Vheissus.”
“Politics is a kind of engineering isn't it. With people as your raw material.”
“History, the proverb says, is made at night. The European civil servant normally sleeps at night. What waits in his IN basket to confront him at nine in the morning is history.”
“Dream tonight of peacock tails, / Diamond fields and spouter whales. / Ills are many, blessings few, / But dreams tonight will shelter you.”
“You're Orthodox? No. Conservative? Young people never are. My parents were Orthodox. They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve.”
“s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The introduction presents a brief biography of Orwell as well as a reflection on some of the critical responses to Nineteen Eighty-Four. Pynchon also offers his own reflection in the introduction that”
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“s Cool, the second album of indie rock band Lotion, in which he states that”
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“neat, tiny script on engineer”
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El Imparcial - Diario liberal e independiente: Thomas Pynchon: Vineland - El Imparcial
Public attention spiked: 14,585 Wikipedia readers in one day, 9.1× the usual 1,596, with 0 article edits.
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The New York Times: Thomas Pynchon
Wall Street Journal: Fiction: Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Shadow Ticket’
The Guardian: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon review – his first novel in 12 years tunes into rising fascism in the US
Yahoo: Thomas Pynchon's 'Shadow Ticket' is a 1930s detective tale with a sucker punch ending
The Guardian: From V to Vineland and Inherent Vice: Thomas Pynchon’s books – ranked!
The Guardian: Thomas Pynchon announces Shadow Ticket, his first novel in more than a decade
Yahoo: Thomas Pynchon has a new novel coming this fall. It's his first in 12 years
After the publication of Shadow Ticket and the release of One Battle After Another (a film adaptation of Vineland), Parul Sehgal wrote, "beginning with his novels V
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Paul Thomas Anderson released the film One Battle After Another, inspired by plot points from Vineland
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The Guardian: From Kafka to Gogol via Pynchon: top 10 absurd quests in fiction
Pynchon was photographed near his apartment in New York's Upper West Side district when he went to vote with his son
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GQ: Can You Spot Thomas Pynchon in P.T. Anderson's Inherent Vice Trailer?
Jackson Pynchon graduated from Columbia University, where he was affiliated with St
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Pynchon's novels were released in e-book format, ending a long holdout by the author
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The New Yorker: My Meetings with Thomas Pynchon
With the character voiceover narrated by Pynchon
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Told The New Yorker that they met him through his accountant, who was drummer Rob Youngberg's mother; she gave him an advance copy of the album and he agreed to write the liner notes, only later seeing them in conce
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Pynchon joined a campaign by many other major authors to clear Ian McEwan of plagiarism charges by sending a typewritten letter to his British publisher, which was published in The Daily Telegraph
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And is 1,085 pages long in the first edition hardcover
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The Sunday before Against the Day was released
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“Spanning the period between the Chicago World”
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Over 120 letters that Pynchon had written to his longtime agent, Candida Donadio, were donated by the family of a private collector, Carter Burden, to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City
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A CNN camera crew filmed him in Manhattan
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Penned a 3,000-word set of liner notes for the album Spiked
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Pynchon married his literary agent, Melanie Jackson—a great-granddaughter of Theodore Roosevelt and a granddaughter of Robert H
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Awarded MacArthur Fellows Program (1988).
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Pynchon received a MacArthur Fellowship and, since the early 1990s at least, he has been frequently cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature
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With a lengthy autobiographical introduction
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“Podróże w czasie do przodu i do tyłu, manipulowanie związkami przyczynowo-skutkowymi, niekiedy rzeczywistość zaczyna się rozpadać, pikselizować i migotać. Dzieją się dziwne rzeczy, których nikt się nie spodziewał, nawet pogoda staje się kapryśna, wszystko przez agentów służb specjalnych, naruszających strukturę czasu.”
Claimed that Pynchon was in fact J
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“Brytyjczycy mają akcenty, smokingi, skomplikowany kod sygnałów świadczący o przynależności klasowej. W Nowym Jorku najważniejsze są buty.”
“„Dlaczego Ice, choć jest Żydem, przekazuje ogromne środki finansowe wrogom Izraela?” – zastanawia się płaczliwie autor dossier i proponuje następujące wyjaśnienie: ze zwykłej chciwości, jako podwójny agent, jako Żyd nienawidzący swojego żydostwa.”
“Jedenasty września zinfantylizował cały kraj. Ameryka mogła dorosnąć, lecz zamiast tego postanowiła powrócić do dzieciństwa.”
“(…) Maxine spędza czarujące półtorej godziny w towarzystwie swojego szwagra, Avrama Deschlera, który pilnuje ozora à la Polonaise, powoli gotującego się w kuchni przez cały dzień. Mieszkanie wypełnia się intrygującym aromatem, który po chwili zapada głęboko w pamięć.”
“Można by pomyśleć, że upadek wież stanie się resetem dla Nowego Jorku, rynku nieruchomości, Wall Street, szansą, by zacząć wszystko od początku. A tymczasem jest gorzej niż przedtem.”
“Później po powrocie do domu, w chwili wdowiego zamyślenia Maxine siada w samotności, gasi światło, wyjmuje kopertę z gotówką i wdycha ostatnie ślady zapachu jego podłej wody kolońskiej, próbując przywołać z powrotem coś równie niewidzialnego, nieważkiego i niemożliwego do opisania jak jego dusza…”
“(…) późny kapitalizm to piramida finansowa w skali globalnej, na jej szczycie składa się ofiary z ludzi, a frajerzy mają wierzyć, że wszystko będzie trwało wiecznie.”
“W środku Maxine znajduje niewielkie dossier, z którego dowiadujemy się natychmiast – najwyraźniej autor uznał to za bardzo ważne – że Gabriel Ice jest z pochodzenia Żydem, a jednocześnie nielegalnie transferuje miliony dolarów amerykańskich na konto w Dubaju, kontrolowane przez Wahabicki Fundusz Ekumeniczny (FPM), który według dossier zajmuje się finansowaniem działalności terrorystycznej.”
Won William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for Gravity's Rainbow (1975).
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Pynchon declined the William Dean Howells Medal
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Awarded National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow (1974).
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Pynchon was one of 447 signatories to the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest"
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“A Journey Into the Mind of Watts”
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“has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity ... It is this deep sensitivity to abysses that makes Warlock, I think, one of our best American novels. For we are a nation that can, many of us, toss with all aplomb our candy wrapper into the Grand Canyon itself, snap a color shot and drive away; and we need voices like Oakley Hall”
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Awarded William Faulkner Foundation Award for V. (1964).
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“If they come out on paper anything like they are inside my head then it will be the literary event of the millennium.”
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Applied to study mathematics as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, but was turned down
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Studied at Cornell University, Bachelor of Arts (1953–1959).
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Pynchon and Sale wrote part or all of a science-fiction musical, Minstrel Island, which portrays a dystopian future in which IBM rules the world
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Pynchon returned to Cornell to pursue a degree in English
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Was aboard the destroyer USS Hank in the Mediterranean during the Suez Crisis
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Studied at Oyster Bay High School, high school diploma (1953).
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After losing it down the toilet in 1939 at the Roseland Ballroom in Roxbury, Boston, to the strains of the jazz standard "Cherokee", upon which tune Charlie Parker was simultaneously inventing bebop in New York, as Pynch
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In Glen Cove, New York on Long Island, one of three children of engineer and politician Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Sr
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Born 1937-05-08.
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Centers on a Milwaukee private investigator who is set adrift in Hungary while tracking the heiress to a Wisconsin cheese fortune
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We simply grow up. In Florence, at age fifty-four, I was a brash youth. Had I known the Duse was there her poet chap might have found dangerous competition, ha-ha. The only trouble is that now, nearing eighty, I keep discovering that damned war has made the world older than I. The world frowns now on youth in a vacuum, it insists youth be turned-to, utilized, exploited. No time for pranks. No more Vheissus.
You're Orthodox? No. Conservative? Young people never are. My parents were Orthodox. They believe, I believe, that whatever your father is, as long as your mother is Jewish, you are Jewish too because we all come from our mother's womb. A long unbroken chain of Jewish mothers going all the way back to Eve.
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