Author Thomas Pynchon — whose novel Inherent Vice was turned into the 2014 neo-noir comedy of the same name — is a mystery wrapped in an enigma, as the saying goes. And that characterization doesn’t even stem from the dense comic material of his many novels.
Instead it describes Pynchon himself. The author has long nurtured a penchant for mystery, or at least privacy. As a result, he is perversely as famous for being unknowable as he is for being well known, a little like the great J.D. Salinger.
Pynchon’s work is famously obscure, inscrutable and at the same time popular. He is, based on that combination alone, one of a kind in the publishing world — a difficult, popular author.
This just in! The Huntington has acquired the literary archive of Thomas Pynchon, considered by many to be among the greatest novelists of our time. https://t.co/HeSbQGMRw0 pic.twitter.com/iRoR52PlVP
— The Huntington (@TheHuntington) December 14, 2022
Future generations will get the chance to know Pynchon better, because The Huntington, a “research and cultural center with 120 acres of botanical gardens, an art museum, a library of rare books & manuscripts” in San Marino, CA, has acquired the writer’s archives.
Until then, there are thousands of PhD dissertations that attempt to dissect the work of the man who wrote The Crying of Lot 49 (audio book here), V, and Gravity’s Rainbow (National Book Award, 1974).
But for those without time to delve, we — in a Pychonesque move — asked ChatGPT the following question: “What is important about author Thomas Pynchon and his famous privacy?”
The artificial intelligence engine replied: “Thomas Pynchon is an American novelist known for his dense, complex works of fiction and his insistence on privacy. He is widely considered one of the greatest living American novelists and has won numerous awards for his writing, including the National Book Award for Gravity’s Rainbow in 1974. Pynchon is known for his reclusive nature and has rarely given interviews or appeared in public. Despite this, his novels have had a profound influence on American literature and have been studied and analyzed by scholars and critics around the world.”
