Thomas Pynchon

Name at birth: Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr.

Literary critics loved Thomas Pynchon's first novel, V, published in 1963. Instantly he was considered one of the great new prose modernists, often compared to Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. Pynchon's next books, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Gravity's Rainbow (1973), established him as one of America's best living authors. His books are funny and tragic, hip Kafkaesque quests about love and death that have earned a cult following. Like J. D. Salinger, Pynchon has dodged publicity to the point where his reclusiveness has defined his public image, creating a rich environment for speculation and rumor about the man himself. Throughout the 1990s scholars and fans debated whether Pynchon was really the man behind The Letters of Wanda Tinasky to the AVA, a collection of letters written in the late '80s to a central California newspaper. Pynchon denied it, but that didn't stop the rumors. In 2000 the book Author Unknown: On the Trail of Anonymous claimed that Pynchon was not Wanda Tinasky.