SLSL Pynchon a '60s student radical? Re: SLSL Intro: Pynchon bio

[pynchonoid]

--- Message-ID: <B9EE9928.5856%jbor at bigpond.com>
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, rather than a "blue
>collar worker" I think 

It is clear in the Intro that Pynchon's sympathies are
with blue collar workers and student radicals in the
60s -- not surprising, since TRP had blue collar work
experience himself, as well as an undergraduate
college career in the 50s.  It seems quite a stretch
to assert that Pynchon was one of the "college kids",
or student radicals of the early 60s, it just doesn't
compute, since you have the dates wrong:


jbor:
>He was an undergraduate 
>at
>Cornell until 1960 


Quoting the Pynchon timeline that Dave Monroe
provided:

June 1959            Pynchon receives B.A. in English
with "distinction in all subjects"  [...]

February 1960     Publication of "Low-lands" allows
Pynchon to move to Seattle and work for Boeing
                            (writing technical
documents on the ill-fated Bomark guided missile, no
less) 
http://www.millikin.edu/aci/crow/chronology/pynchonbio.html

and the Pomona Pynchon page:

"He received his B.A. in June of 1959 with
"distinction in all subjects." 
http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/bio/facts.html

Even dating the beginning of "the '60s" back into the
'50s, as some cultural historians do, doesn't make
Pynchon a student radical in the '50s. After all, of
himself he says, p. 6 of the Intro, "Being an
unpolitical '50s student, I was unaware of this at the
time", referring to an understanding of "the class
angle" which, as he writes the Introduction, he
discovers in one of these stories. 


-Doug




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

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
HotJobs - Search new jobs daily now
http://hotjobs.yahoo.com/