more prolegomena: early 1963

[kelber at mindspring.com]

Was '63 the first paperback edition?  I'd erroneously thought that was the publishing date.   Feb. 1961 was pretty soon after he left college, wasn't it?

Two other things that might have informed the writing of V.:

Eichmann was captured in May, 1960, although his trial didn't begin until 1961.  Did this set off ruminations in Pynchon on the earlier Herero genocide?

Then there was this article, published in Astronautics, in Sept. '60.  It's the article that coins the term "cyborg."  Too late to have influenced V.?  But expressing ideas that were possibly floating around?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2962194/Cyborgs-and-Space-Clynes-Kline?autodown=pdf

If not yet called cyborgs, robots and ideas of robotic limbs, etc. must have been chatted about at Boeing.  Pynchon might well have read Astronautics and other similar publications while on the job.

Laura


-----Original Message-----
>From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
>Sent: Jun 7, 2010 4:50 PM
>To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: more prolegomena: early 1963
>
>V. was evidently published by February 1 of 1961...since it was on that date that it won the Wm Faulkner Foundation Award for First Novel. Other winners:
>Cormac McCarthy, Orchard Keeper 1965...Rbt Coover, Origin of the Brunists....Larry Wiowode 1969, What I'm Going to Do, I Think?....others I looked up and have already forgotten. 
> 
>Time Mag's review @3/15.....NYTimes, April 21: George, "Paris Review", Plimpton praises. See the wiki. No other major newspaper, magazine reviews it seems...Tanner, Kermode, others, later and elsewhere it seems. 
>
>
>    * March 22 – The Beatles release their first album Please Please Me.
> 
>When the book was 'going to press': 
>January 14 George C. Wallace becomes governor of Alabama. In his inaugural speech, he defiantly proclaims "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!"[1][2] 
> 
>January 28 – African American student Harvey Gantt enters Clemson University in South Carolina, the last U.S. state to hold out against racial integration. 
> 
>February 11 – The CIA's Domestic Operations Division is created. 
>    * Fedruary 11 Sylvia Plath committed suicide. 
>    * 
>    * February 19 – The publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique launches the reawakening of the Women's Movement in the United States as women's organizations and consciousness-raising groups spread. 
>
> 
>    * March 
>    * Iron Man debuts in Marvel Comics's Tales of Suspense #39. 
>    * 
>March 18 – Gideon v. Wainwright: The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the poor must have lawyers.
> 
>March : Letter from the Birmingham Jail written by MLKjr.  
>
>
>