Pynchon/Pyncheon

[Jeffrey Meikle]

A couple quick thoughts on this one.  First, it was amusing when scholars
first started writing articles on TRP, around 1970, that often they or
their copyeditors couldn't kick Hawthorne's spelling of Pyncheon, and so
our hero became Thomas Pyncheon.

More important, it had to have meant something to Tom Pynchon, a budding
writer at Cornell, to discover in his AmLit survey the ambiguous Puritan
heritage shared by him and his family embodied forth so evocatively in
Hawthorne's romance of the Pyncheon family.  From romantic allegory to
comically meaningful characters' names, from the weight of history to the
distrust of technological progress, from psychological hauntings to the
depths of the human heart, there's a lot of Hawthorne in Pynchon--thus, in
a sense, Pynchon IS a Pyncheon.

And a begrudging cheers to those of you who have time to indulge,
Jeff