Gravity's Rainbow

Thomas Pynchon was born in Long Island, USA in 1937. He took a scholarship at Cornell University and studied Engineering before switching to study English. He has served in the United States Navy and worked as a technical writer at Boeing.

Thomas Pynchon is the author of V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow, Slow
Learner, a collection of short stories, Vineland, Mason & Dixon. Against the Day, and most recently Inherent Vice. He received the national book award for Gravity's Rainbow in 1974.

"I read this at 19 or so and just thought, like, f*ck, wow: this is the marker, the pace-setter for the contemporary novel" -- Tom McCarthy, Author Of 'c' "Thomas Pynchon, the greatest, wildest and most infuriating author of his generation." -- Ian Rankin Guardian "Pynchon is both the US's most serious and most funny writer." -- Thomas Leveritt Independent "Gravity's Rainbow is bonecrushingly dense, compulsively elaborate, silly, obscene, funny, tragic, pastoral, historical, philosophical, poetic, grindingly dull, inspired, horrific, cold, bloated, beached and blasted.[Pynchon's] novel is in this sense a work of paranoid genius, a magnificent necropolis that will take its place amidst the grand detritus of our culture. Its teetering structure is greater by far than the many surrounding literary shacks and hovels." New York Times "He is almost a mathematician of prose, who calculates the least and the greatest stress each word and line, each pun and ambiguity, can bear, and applies his knowledge accordingly and virtually without lapses, though he takes many scary, bracing linguistic risks. Thus his remarkably supple diction can first treat of a painful and delicate love scene and then roar, without pause, into the sounds and echoes of a drudged and drunken orgy." -- L.E. Sissman New Yorker