SLSL Pynchon as "student radical" Intro "The Way of Communication"

[pynchonoid]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:

> What's interesting is that this card-carrying member
> of the "new left" of
> the early 60s - and one can safely assume Pynchon
> was a one of the "college
> kids", or student radicals

While his sympathies seem to be with the New Left of
the 60s, Pynchon was finished with college by the time
the '60s actually arrived (although he says in the
Intro his education has continued since the days he
describes). He is reported to have graduated from
Cornell in 1959. He talks a bit in the SL Intro about
how tame his college life was, how the exciting stuff
seemed to be happening elsewhere.

>, rather than a "blue
> collar worker" 

Not only was he a college student, in the 50s, Pynchon
 is also said to have had blue collar work experience.
In addition to working on a surveying team (the kind
of work that would  be considered "blue collar"),
enlisted personnel (that's what Pynchon was, I think,
not an officer) in the US military are considered
"blue collar" although I'm not absolutely sure about
that. Being a Private, Private Second Class, then
Private First Class entailed an awful lot of manual
labor when I had the privilege of serving my country
in the US Army, both in the States and out there on
what They called the "Frontier of Freedom" along the
DMZ separating North from South Korea.

-Doug



=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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