And NOWHERE is Pynchon mentioned!

[Monte Davis]

FWIW, one data point that came up in conversation with Mark Kohut recently:

In the fall of 1967 I took a course in "Contemporary American Fiction" at
the New School in NYC, taught by writer and editor James W. Hoffman.
Pynchon was not on the long list in the course catalog entry (Baldwin and
Bellow to Styron and Updike), but Hoffmann added CoL49 to that year's
curriculum with high praise and enthusiasm -- IIRC, pairing it with Bruce
Jay Friedman's Stern in a loosely drawn "black humor" discussion.

I'd tried V a few years before, too young, and bounced off. A friend had
pressed Col49 on me soon after it came out in 1966 and I'd loved it. This
closer re-reading in a classroom context took me deeper into it, sent me
back to finish V., and left me ready to grab GR as soon as it appeared (not
that anyone was actually "ready" for GR). In this connection, then, "campus
novels, to keep assistant professors busy" has a positive rather than
 negative connotation for me.

(Note: of the 36 authors in the course description, Mary McCarthy was the
only woman. Calisher? Howard? Jackson? Janeway? McCullers? Oates? Plath?
Porter? Sarton? Sontag? Welty? Nah, we're talking *serious* writers.
*Major* writers.)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20151214/af475578/attachment.html>