Thomas Pynchon Jr.

Ancestors

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Biography

Thomas Pynchon, Jr. is a currently active postmodern fiction writer, known for his encyclopedic prose, whose first novel was published in 1963. He was born in Glen Cove, New York on Long Island in 1937 to Thomas, Sr. and Catherine Pynchon. By 1940, he had moved with his parents to the East Norwich area of nearby Oyster Bay^[1]. Thomas, Sr. and Catherine had two more children at this location.

Thomas Pynchon, Jr. graduated from Oyster Bay High School in 1953, after which he enrolled at Cornell University. He served in the U.S. Navy for two years from 1955-1957, then returned to Cornell, completing his degree in 1959. He moved to Seattle, Washington and worked for Boeing Aircraft Company as a technical writer from 1960-1962 before quitting to pursue fiction writing full time. He was a resident of California throughout the 1960s and 1970s, but has since returned to his native New York. He was married in the 1990s to his literary agent Melanie Jackson. They have one son together.

Thomas Pynchon, Jr. received the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974 for his novel Gravity's Rainbow and the MacArthur Fellowship "Genius Grant" in 1988. Also in 1974, Gravity's Rainbow was unanimously recommended by a jury for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, but the nomination was vetoed by the board due to the novel's obscenity and "overwritten" style, which were deemed to make the book unreadable. The novel was also nominated for the Nebula Award for science fiction and fantasy novels in 1973. Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice was adapted into a film directed by Paul Thomas Anderson in 2014. The film was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2015 Academy Awards.

Sources

1. ↑ 1940 U.S. Census, Nassau County, New York, population schedule, Oyster Bay, page 5145 (stamped), house 82, Thomas R Pynchon Jr; image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com/ : accessed 3 Aug 2016); citing NARA microfilm publication T627.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Pynchon