is 67 today. The always excellent Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor tells us about Pynchon.
It’s the birthday of novelist Thomas Pynchon, born in Glen Cove, Long Island (1937). In college at Cornell University, he majored in engineering physics. He got straight A’s in all his engineering and physics classes, but after taking a class from Vladimir Nabokov, he decided to switch his major to English literature.
After college, he got a job working as a technical writer for the Boeing aerospace company. Employees there described him as incredibly quiet and diligent. He worked at the company for two years, and then traveled to Mexico, where he produced his first novel, V. (1963), about drunken former sailors, alligator hunters in the sewers of New York City, and the search for a mysterious female spy. V. was one of the most critically acclaimed novels of the 1960s, and Time magazine sent a photographer to Mexico City to find the author. According to legend, Pynchon jumped out the window of his apartment and fled into the mountains to escape the photographer. Since that day, he has never willingly submitted to a photograph, given an interview, or appeared in public.
His second novel was The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), about a woman’s effort to uncover a secret international postal service called W.A.S.T.E., which uses a muted trumpet as its logo. The novel became a cult favorite among college students, and fans of the book began to draw muted trumpets on bathroom walls and subway corridors, to suggest that the fictional postal service actually existed.
In 1973, Pynchon published Gravity’s Rainbow, which many consider his masterpiece, the story of a secret society of rocket scientists conspiring to take over the world in the closing days of World War II. He didn’t publish another book for the next seventeen years, and he became a kind of mythical figure. People said that he lived on the run, giving out false names wherever he went. Some claimed he had joined a band of Mexican rebel fighters. Others claimed that he and J.D. Salinger were actually the same person. And near the end of the 1980s, there was speculation that he might, in fact, be the Unabomber.
Then, in the late 1990s, an article in New York magazine revealed that he lived in New York City with his wife and son. He wasn’t hiding out in an underground bunker; he just wasn’t seeking publicity. He published his most recent novel, Mason and Dixon in 1997, and he has since written the liner notes for a rock band called Lotion and provided an introduction for a new edition of George Orwell’s 1984. In January of this year, he played himself on the animated TV show The Simpsons, wearing a paper bag over his animated head.
The Beatles released their last album, Let It Be, on this date in 1970. The tracks were originally recorded 14 months earlier, well before Abbey Road. 