Thomas Pynchon

Thomas Pynchon (born 1937) grew up in Glen Cove, Long Island, New York, and studied engineering physics at Cornell University, where he was reportedly influenced by Vladimir Nabokov's literature lectures. He served in the United States Navy before publishing his first novel, V., in 1963, which won the William Faulkner Foundation Award. His second novel, The Crying of Lot 49, appeared in 1966. Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973, was unanimously recommended for the Pulitzer Prize by the fiction jury, but the advisory board overruled them, and no fiction prize was awarded that year. This author hub collects 3 works in the Canon Compass ranking, led by Gravity's Rainbow.