Pics of Pynchon

[Orlowsky at aol.com]

For all those with the secret, shameful desire to see photos of Pynchon
(nearly all of us, I would guess), you can find them in the following
published locations:

A lovely sullen photo of Pynchon at 18 appears in the New York magazine of
May 13, 1974 and in Newsweek a week later.

A handful of yearbook photos from the Oyster Bay High School "Oysterette" are
reprinted in Cliff Mead's Thomas Pynchon: A Bibliography of Primary and
Secondary Sources.

A terrific photo of a smiling young Pynchon in his sailor suit graces the
back cover of David Cowart's Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Illusion (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois University Press 1980).

All of the above photos date from the '50s.  To my knowledge, no other
published photos of the man exist.  A couple of others are rumored to exist:
 a photo of Farina and Pynchon in period garb dueling with pistols in a
graveyard is said to appear in "the joke edition of the [Cornell] Sun for the
spring of '59," and a photo of Pynchon as a pallbearer at Farina's funeral is
said to appear in the first edition only of the Judy Collins Songbook, but
I've looked at a few copies and haven't seen it.  The Songbook does include a
section of Collins' reminiscences of Farina, though, so maybe some briefly
extant early edition does contain the photo.

Finally, Pynchon Notes 28-29 contains a series of artist's renderings of what
Pynchon might have looked like at various ages, based on the high school
yearbook portrait.

And, of course, there's the infamous 1973 Dick Cavett TV interview where
Pynchon sits behind an opaque screen and refuses to take Cavett's questions
seriously.

Bob