Suggestions (Gale online - biography)

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Written by: Bernard Duyfhuizen, University of Wisconsin--Eau Claire
            John M. Krafft, Miami University--Hamilton

Source: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 173: American Novelists
Since World War II, Fifth Series. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited
by James R. Giles, and Wanda H. Giles, Northern Illinois University. The
Gale Group, 1996. pp. 177-201.

Source Database: Dictionary of Literary Biography 

    Thomas Pynchon's ancestral roots go deep into the soil of
America--an appropriate genealogy for a writer whose overriding concern
in his fictional project is the construction of "America" and the
necessary conditions for living within that construction. The first
Pynchon in the New World was William Pynchon, who arrived in 1630. As
Mathew Winston was among the first to point out, William "was a patentee
and treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and a founder both of
Roxbury and of Springfield." Besides being one of the early Puritan
settlers of colonial New England, William was the first Pynchon to
become an author, writing a tract called The Meritorious Price of Our
Redemption (1650), which was judged heretical because it challenged the
tenets of "Election" (the Puritan belief that the salvation or damnation
of each individual was predetermined) that upheld American Puritan
theology and social organization. The tract was banned and burned in
Boston, and William soon returned to England, presaging the themes of
alienation and exile that typify the American experience of so many of
Thomas Pynchon's characters. Indeed, as Louis Mackey and others have
shown, any complete reading of Pynchon's fiction must consider its
American Puritan context.
    Many readers of American literature have first encountered the
Pynchon name in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables
(1851)--in which it is spelled "Pyncheon." Two members of the family
wrote to Hawthorne to complain about his characterization of their
ancestors. One of these disgruntled readers was the Reverend Thomas
Ruggles Pynchon, who eventually became the ninth president of Trinity
College in Hartford, Connecticut. This nineteenth-century namesake of
the present Pynchon is also a worthy literary precursor. In his teaching
and scholarship at Trinity, Thomas Ruggles Pynchon examined both science
and religion, while another of the twentieth-century Pynchon's thematic
preoccupations is the interpenetration of science and scientific theory
in late twentieth-century life. Although Thomas Ruggles Pynchon
apparently did not concern himself with Thomas Pynchon's favorite
nineteenth-century scientific concept, entropy, the Reverend Pynchon's
writings do suggest a family predisposition to an interest in science.
    A third branch of the family is connected to the once-prosperous
stock brokerage firm Pynchon and Company. As Charles Hollander has
detailed, Pynchon and Company was active on the New York Stock Exchange
during the 1920s, investing in the aviation industry, electric
utilities, and Fox Films and General Theaters. In the crash of 1929 and
the following economic depression, the firm was hard hit, ultimately
suspended from trading on the New York Stock Exchange, and placed into
receivership with the Irving Trust Company. A link can be inferred
between some key Pynchon and Company investments and some of Thomas
Pynchon's interests in rockets (the next generation in aviation),
utility and other cartels, and motion pictures. Hollander infers an even
deeper conjunction, citing connections, extending back to colonial
America, between the Pynchon family and the Morgan family, with Pynchon
and Company a "Morgan satrap." Thus, Hollander sees the fall of Pynchon
and Company as part of a larger dynastic/historical struggle between
older Morgan interests and the emerging Rockefeller interests.
    To what degree the sweep of Hollander's inference is valid and to
what degree Pynchon's ancestors directly affect his writing are open to
debate, but in dealing with a writer whose fictional method thrives on
"kute korrespondences," every scrap of biographical detail hints at a
deeper story. It is a story Pynchon is reluctant to tell directly. He
avoids the contemporary media machine of personality marketing, keeping
most of his life relatively secret.
    What is known is that Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr., was born in Glen
Cove, Long Island, New York, on 8 May 1937 and grew up in East Norwich
in the town of Oyster Bay. His father was an industrial surveyor and
highway engineer and a local Republican politician. It is easy to
imagine, given Gravity's Rainbow (1973) in particular, how growing up in
the atmosphere of World War II, the Korean conflict, and the developing
Cold War sensitized Pynchon to the political, social, and cultural
issues that shape his writing. In 1953, when he was just sixteen,
Pynchon graduated as class salutatorian from Oyster Bay High School,
receiving an award for "the senior attaining the highest average in the
study of English." The juvenilia published in his high-school paper,
Purple and Gold, during his senior year already reveal Pynchon's
irreverence for authority and his playfulness in naming characters.
    In the fall of 1953 Pynchon entered Cornell University as a
scholarship student in the recently established engineering physics
program. Although Pynchon remained only one year in this program, whose
mission was a response to "the expanding technological activities in the
country," he maintained his interest in science, particularly the human
use and abuse to which science is put. As a sophomore, Pynchon left
engineering physics for arts and sciences and then dropped out of
Cornell after that year for a two-year tour of duty in the U.S. Navy. He
said, in a rare statement about his writing and his life, that his navy
experience provided him with one of his favorite characters, Pig Bodine,
the archetypal AWOL sailor. Not much more is generally known of
Pynchon's navy years (except for some personal information gleaned by
David Cowart). His service records were destroyed in a Saint Louis fire;
other "official" records--the usual stuff of biographical snoops--have
either vanished or been sealed, apparently at Pynchon's request. The
story of Pynchon's life becomes increasingly hazy as he undertook his
vocation in earnest.
    In 1957 he returned to Cornell to complete his degree in English,
graduating in June 1959. During those last two years, he became friends
with Richard Fariña, to whom he would later dedicate Gravity's Rainbow.
In memory of Fariña, who died in 1966, Pynchon wrote an introduction to
the 1983 edition of Fariña's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
(1966). Pynchon, Fariña, and other friends, including Kirkpatrick Sale,
were influenced in these formative years by Beat writers such as Jack
Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but they were also poised to move beyond
their modernist and New Critical education to begin, especially in
Pynchon's case, constructing the postmodern. One Cornell professor,
Vladimir Nabokov, could obviously have served as a mentor and role model
for such a project, but here Pynchon's biography shades into rumor. How
much direct contact Pynchon had with Nabokov at Cornell is uncertain.
Yet Pynchon's fictional project does have affinities with Nabokov's, not
least a love of literary playfulness in naming characters. If Pynchon
did attend Nabokov's classes, he received an excellent introduction to
classic writers of fiction (see Nabokov's Lectures on Literature, 1980)
and witnessed Nabokov's meticulous attention to the formal details of
narrative construction--lessons that would stand any aspiring writer in
good stead.
    During his last two years at Cornell Pynchon wrote most of the early
stories that--with the exception of "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna"--he
later collected in Slow Learner (1984): "The Small Rain" (Cornell
Writer, March 1959), "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" (Epoch , Spring
1959), "Low-Lands" ( New World Writing, 1960), "Entropy" (Kenyon Review,
1960), and "Under the Rose" (Noble Savage, 1961), an early version of
chapter 3 of his first novel, V. (1963). Pynchon has characterized the
stories he wrote at Cornell as "apprentice" fiction; nevertheless, this
early work rehearses themes and character types central to his novels.
In 1960, having failed to win a Ford Foundation Fellowship to work with
an opera company, Pynchon went to work as a technical writer in Seattle,
writing about missiles for Boeing. During his two and a half years there
he was undoubtedly immersed in the composition of V.

[continued, but as criticism, and rather long]